Can Jeff Bezos Catch Elon Musk? Blue Origin at $130B | Reflection AI vs. DeepSeek | Interview with Shawn Bercuson

**Aman Verjee** (0:00)
And whether or not Chinese open source, open weight models take over completely, or just provide margin pressure, that changes the math for a lot of other players in the market.

**Dave McClure** (0:09)
Let's talk about Reflection. They're definitely in the game, they're definitely a player to be considered very seriously, and they have a big advantage because they're an American, they're not Chinese.

**Shawn Bercuson** (0:18)
At one point, I think Forbes called us the fastest growing company of all time. We hit a billion dollars in revenue in less than two years.
I think we're about to witness a big evolution in the private market. Again, I think people have tasted what the private market is and are paying attention to it today in a way that they haven't been before.

**Aman Verjee** (0:56)
Welcome to another episode of our very bad, horrible, terrible VC Secondary Podcast, Trading Places. All right, well, let's do a rundown of this week's news. We've been off for a week, so we're kind of catching up a little bit here. We're gonna talk through Setter's top 30 on their secondary scoreboard. Setter is an advisor for the secondary market, helps manage a broker several deals there. We'll cover a little bit about the anthropic fable mythos, on again, off again, ceasefire. I think we're under a ceasefire now. US is not throwing shots at anthropic anymore. OpenAI released their new product, GPT 5.6, affectionately named Sol, Terra and Luna.
We're seeing a lot of conversations about the cost of computing in AI and whether Chinese open weight models or other US based open source models are going to put pressure on margins for the top frontier labs. Along with that, Meta just released their new MuSpark 1.1 version, which is actually seemingly doing quite well. Following the footsteps of Elon Musk, they're going to also rent out computes and become an official hyperscaler. Kind of been an unofficial hyperscaler in the past. On the valuations and IPOs and raise market, SKHY is not really an IPO per se, but a foreign public company out of Korea that's now debuting in the US and did quite well. Blue Origin, a company founded by Jeff Bezos competing with SpaceX, raised $10 billion on $130 billion valuation.
$130 billion, not really that big anymore, given that SpaceX launched at one and a half trillion.

**Dave McClure** (2:45)
That's a seed round, Dave. That's a Blue Origin seed. It's a founder-led seed round, so give him credit, buddy.

**Aman Verjee** (2:52)
Last on the list, Kalshi raising at $40 billion. That's in the prediction market. Maybe jumping ahead of Polymarket. I guess maybe Polymarket will be catching up later in the year. Well, let's get started with our assessment of where things are happening. We're going to show a little bit of where the Seder top 30 companies are in their list. We've often covered the top 20 from Augment Software's perspective, but Seder is another secondary provider. Anything surprising to you on this list, among them, this is showing people moving around from Q1 to Q2. SpaceX no longer on the list, I guess they're probably a public company now. So the top five, no real surprises there. Anthropic, Andrel, OpenAI, Databricks and Stripe.
Polymarket now also high on that list, Kalshi not too far behind. And then we get into a lot more companies that seem like they're very hardware focused, defense tech focused, physical bits, if you will. Are we seeing certainly emergence of hardware companies, defense tech software versus software?

**Dave McClure** (4:02)
Yes, it seems like it. So SpaceX is off the list. They are now, they got called up to the majors. They're out of the minor leagues and got called up to the show. I don't think they're going to get sent back down. So they're off the list. And by virtue of that, I can't argue with Anthropic or Andrel being one, two. OpenAI getting a little bit ahead of Stripe, maybe getting promoted seems a little bit of a surprise that they're moving up in Q2. But I guess Sutter is doing this based on demand from buyers coming in. And so although we've heard some noise about OpenAI, it seems like there is demand from buyers. So that's maybe not that surprising.
The defense areas we're talking about, we're seeing Sironic on the list, ShieldAI moving up a little bit. So that would seem to be part of the story. And FigureAI got a big jump. I know they're generating revenue. I don't know how much. And Neuralink getting a little bit of a bump. I don't think they're generating any commercial revenue. So there are some surprises that these companies that are AI and robotics continue to get promoted. That does seem like a theme in Q2.