Thomas Laffont: The $4T AI IPO Wave, 2026's Unicorn Economy, and the 10X Paradox

**Thomas Laffont** (0:00)
Why do you think I waited to make my world podcast premiere for AllIn? All the ankle biters called and I said, no, I'm just going to wait. I'm going to wait till the besties call.

**David Sacks** (0:08)
Coatue is one of the most successful hedge funds of the last two decades.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:12)
$55 billion under management.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:14)
This is their flagship hedge fund.

**Thomas Laffont** (0:15)
The reason we decided to get into this business is to find great entrepreneurs and find great companies.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:21)
And they're looking to raise a whole billion dollars more to invest in AI.

**Thomas Laffont** (0:25)
We're in an idea business, and when you have a truly revolutionary idea, it can get really big. I hope to do something a little bit different. Besties, you've been on for a couple hours, so you can take a break now for a few minutes. Sit back. We are going to show you some slides, and we're going to walk you through really an update on the unicorn economy. So the markets are back. We can see that the unicorn economy on average, since September of 24 is up 70 percent. I think that's intuitive to a lot of us. But what's even more amazing is that the public market has really made the same move up. So if we look at the share of the unicorn economy of the NASDAQ, which had a significant move up since 2015, it's really kind of plateaued over the past few years, and I think it speaks to the performance of public companies like Palo Alto and others. So AI is dominating fundraising. What's kind of interesting in this slide is you can see the share continues to increase. So multiple years in a row now that AI is increasing its wallet share of fundraising. But the composition of that funding has changed. If you look at the Unicorn Factory, which really peaked in the Zerp era of 2021, we've now really normalized at a much lower level pre-COVID. So mathematically, if you put both together, you can see that the funding per Unicorn has increased 5x since 2021 So we have fewer Unicorns that are each raising more.
Now I'm going to spend a minute on this slide because this slide is really about the health of our ecosystem. So the way to interpret this is if you look at the green line, which is the pre-Zerp era Unicorn cohort, of which there's about 73 You can see that 20 quarters after becoming a Unicorn, 80% of them had either raised a new round or exited, which is, I would say, pretty healthy. Now if we look at the 2021 cohort, which is the red line, two things stand out. First, that 20 quarters in, you can see less than 20% less had either exited or raised. But look at the number, 479 versus 73 in the prior cohort. So now here comes this new cohort, what we'll call our 2024 cohort of AI companies. And the key question is, what will happen in the future? Which of these cohorts will they resemble the most? So we talked about how AI is concentrating the funding base of Unicorns. But what we also see is the top 10 is capturing a significant share of funding. So it's not just AI companies, it's a small number of AI companies, which probably makes sense since we know that Enthropic and OpenAI are raising massive rounds.
And so what I like to think is we kind of have a new index. If we really thought about what the index of the future is, what for now I'll be able to call the Magnificent 8, but that number is going to shrink as these companies go public. The first thing that jumps to my mind is, wow, what an incredible group of companies. And look at the diversity, SpaceX, Stripe, Enthropic, Databricks, Revolut, ByteDance, Andoril. We have Internet, we have AI, we have FinTech, we have Space Tech. I'd feel pretty comfortable owning this index if I could for the next decade plus. And obviously, the performance of this index has been incredible. It represents almost $4 trillion of value and has really crushed the traditional kind of Mag-7. Almost every single one of these names has outperformed that index.
We'll go to the next slide.
Now, another positive sign is that if we look at the exits, the exits are thawing. So one of the things that we've talked a lot about with the Besties over the years is, we know the unicorn economy is great at consuming cash, but how much cash is it really returning? We need to have a balance between the amount of cash consumed to the amount of cash returned. That's how an ecosystem stays in balance. And if we look, 2026 is actually on a pretty good trend. Not quite where 2021 was, but pretty good. And we still have half a year to go.