20VC: SpaceX Soars to $2.7TRN | Anthropic's Fable Banned by US Government | Wix and Adobe Hit All-Time Lows | Mistral Raising at $20BN and The Case for Sovereign Models | Fin Acquired by Salesforce for $3.6BN

**Everett Randall** (0:00)
Anyone that has been blindly loyal to Elon, they've all got stupidly rich. At the face of it, this is a Rubicon moment in the history of the AI industry. It's the first time that the US has ostensibly regulated an AI model based on capabilities.

**Rory Driscoll** (0:14)
Good intentions bite you in the ass more than evil deeds.

**Everett Randall** (0:17)
Outside of China, there are basically no good open source models. Where are the US open source models? There's a partner here at Benchmark that says any liquidity for pre-AI SaaS companies is top decile performance, any liquidity at all.

**Harry Stebbings** (0:29)
This week, it's different to any other week. Why? The one and only Jason Lemkin is traveling. But do not fret, Royo Driscoll is joined by one of the best early stage investors, Everett Randall, GP at Benchmark, where again, we analyze the biggest news in tech this week. Number one on the agenda, SpaceX completes the largest IPO in history. Then we hit on Anthropic, launching Claude Fable on Monday, and the government bans it by Thursday? What does this mean for sovereignty? Next, Salesforce acquires Fynn for $3.6 billion, one of the nicest teams in tech. And then finally, Adobe beats and raises, but the stock falls 6% as the CFO exits. This and much more in an incredible week of news. 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. It can't pay back 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, 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 Pouzaz 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 a thousand 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 P&L, go to invisibletech.ai/20vc.

**Rory Driscoll** (4:01)
You have now arrived at your destination.

**Harry Stebbings** (4:04)
Okay, boys, I am so excited for this. We have a very special guest. Ev, thank you so much for joining us, man.

**Everett Randall** (4:10)
Harry, Rory, thank you for having me.

**Harry Stebbings** (4:12)
Now, where else are we going to start? SpaceX, the largest IPO in history.
It was a very successful IPO and it's held its price really well. In the last 24 hours, it's hit 2.7 trillion. Elon Musk has actually earned in 24 hours what Warren Buffett took a lifetime to earn in terms of net worth. And he is now a trillion dollars richer than the next person as a result of that increase. How did we evaluate the SpaceX IPO?