20VC: Dario and Anthropic Declare War on Open-Source | Coinbase Slash AI Spend by 50% | Kalshi's $40BN Valuation and Impending IPO | Bending Spoons: Smartest IPO of 2026 and the Year for SaaS Roll-Ups

**Jason Lemkin** (0:00)
I am getting burnout on struggling CEOs on Twitter sharing performative AI data when they're not AI companies. Like, show me the money.

**Rory O'Driscoll** (0:08)
If you can be the largest tech company on the planet and still not make money, you might have oversized your ambitions a little and it might pay to come back a bit. Software companies in the age of AI are either accelerating or irrelevant.

**Jason Lemkin** (0:20)
AI is gonna be like the oil situation in the Persian Gulf today.

**Rory O'Driscoll** (0:23)
Poor Warren Buffett is like, it's time for me to die because you people have lost the plot.

**Jason Lemkin** (0:28)
As we record this, greed will still trump fear, right?

**Harry Stebbings** (0:31)
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and today it's my favorite show of the week, Rory O'Driscoll, Jason Lemkin coming together to discuss the biggest, best news that's happened in the last seven days. This is the only podcast that you need to listen to every week to stay up to date on what matters in tech. But before we dive into the show today, let me tell you about Omni. It's an AI analytics platform and it solves a problem every scaling company hits. Your team needs insights, not just data lookups, the stuff that really matters and it's critical to get it right. Like CAC payback periods and net dollar retention. For AI agents to act on your company data, they need your business context, your definitions, your logic, your permissions. And that's what Omni's governed context graph provides. Your data team defines it once, then anyone, your Ops lead, your CFO, your PM can ask a question in English and get an answer in seconds. Perplexity, Mercury and DBT run on Omni, and 20 VC listeners get a free three-week trial. Three-week, very specific, not a month, but three weeks. Go to omni.co/20vc, that's omni.co/20vc.
After Omni helps you find the right customers, Checkout helps you close them. Over the past 15 years, Guillem Puzas has led checkout.com through what he calls the velocity years, a period of hyper growth with relentless product building. The lesson? High growth is a gift, but it demands ruthless focus. As his mother put it, play the game you're good at. For checkout.com, that game is digital payments, obsessing over data, chasing basis points and compounding learnings over time. And that discipline is paying off. 2025, checkout.com processed over 300 billion in total volume, up 64% year over year and returned to full year EBITDA profitability. They now support over 1000 enterprise merchants globally, including 63 that process more than a billion annually, with brands like eBay, Vinted, Amex, Asos and Tmoo. Guillaume's message, so it's pretty clear. They've earned the right to win anywhere. Now, they're investing in innovation across marketplaces, issuing, financial experiences and agentic commerce. If you want payments built for what's next, talk to the team at checkout.com. That's checkout.com. While Checkout powers the moment money changes hands, Invisible powers the people behind the work. Why don't we hear more real AI success stories from big companies? The models are insanely good, but implementation is the problem. It's really, really hard. There's data all over the place. There's legacy tech and manual workarounds. It's a Ferrari engine in a shopping cart. Meet Invisible. Invisible trains 80% of the top models and then adapts them to the messy reality of your business. Take the Charlotte Hornets NBA team. Invisible took years of game tape and analog scouting notes to go from uncertainty to a draft pick and summer league championship win in weeks, not seasons. Get the data in order first and suddenly AI can do almost anything for you in the enterprise. If you want AI that hits the PNL, go to invisibletech.ai/20vc.

**Rory O'Driscoll** (3:34)
You have now arrived at your destination.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:37)
Boys, it is the holiday edition, baby. Coming to you from the British Riviera. I'm looking forward.
I always say this is like the UK's Saint-Tropez. And then people look up Frinton-on-Sea and they're like, huh, Americans don't get the British sarcasm.

**Rory O'Driscoll** (3:51)
That's my lesson for you.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:54)
We have a lot of news there. I wanted to start on what I think is probably one of the biggest topics of the day, which is more a macro topic or meta topic, but it was brought to light by Brian Armstrong and Coinbase, which is Coinbase spend down 50 percent this quarter, but usage up with regards to how they're utilizing open source, that's taking away from their frontier model usage.
How did we read this? Is this the new normal? Is this a frontier company with a frontier founder doing frontier things in terms of switching so efficiently? How do you read this?