20VC: NVIDIA Bonanza: Buys Poolside & Invests in Mercor and Perplexity | Anthropic's $30TRN Revenue Assumption & OpenAI Confirms IPO | Why Customer Service, Defence and Robotics are Overinflated

**Jason Lemkin** (0:00)
Nine billion doesn't clear the bar for seed investing in 2026

**Rory O'Driscoll** (0:04)
Let me tell you one thing I guarantee. If you get 15X on your failures in Venture, you'll die a rich man. The VC money ran out on Anthropic and OpenAI long ago, which is why no VC owns more than one or two percent of either of them.

**Jason Lemkin** (0:17)
What if it all goes right? Entry price for any of these winners doesn't matter.

**Rory O'Driscoll** (0:21)
They'll go at whatever price they get in 27 because they can't wait any longer. If danger can be described as the absence of choice, they were now in danger. It's all about code. That's the only sentence that matter. Your time is the entire US GDP.
Thanks a bunch, Dario. Good to know.

**Jason Lemkin** (0:36)
I think you have to believe we're less than a third of the way through this cycle. Jesus Christ, if 30 percent of my company leaves to go work for Harvey, I'm dead in the water.

**Rory O'Driscoll** (0:44)
Silicon Valley forgets every three years that the average American is not trying to be efficient.

**Harry Stebbings** (0:49)
Welcome back to another week with the Trio. This is my favorite 20 VC of the week. So we have Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll and me discussing the biggest news that happened this week and hell Nvidia are going fast. One, they're buying Poolside for 12 billion dollars. Two, they're investing in McCaw's 20 billion dollar price round. Three, they're investing in Perplexity's 30 billion dollar price round. Then we move to OpenAI where CFO Sarah Fryer says, hey, we're definitely going public this year. Well, they had no choice thanks to Anthropic also doing the same. And then we discuss a really tough week in the public markets for a lot of the biggest AI names. What to expect moving forwards and whether this is a short term or a long term and how to think about that moving forwards. But before we dive into the show today, when you're building a company, you learn that trust is what closes deals. You may have the best product, but no buyers will sign these days without proof of your security. Here's what happens if you're not prepared. A prospect asks for proof of compliance. The deal stools when you scramble. Your engineer gets pulled off the roadmap to audit prep. Every enterprise conversation turns into this horrible fire drill. That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta is the leading agentic trust platform that not only gets you compliant fast with frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA and GDPR, but keeps you compliant by continuously monitoring your controls. So your deals keep moving and your engineers really keep building. Now, access the Vanta agent everywhere you work, even if your team lives in Claude or Cursor. And that's why Vanta is trusted by more than 16,000 companies like Ramp, Harvey and Writer. So prove you're ready for business and get $1,000 off Vanta. When you go to vanta.com/20vc, that's vanta.com/20vc.
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