Anthropic’s $10B Raise | a16z’s $15B Fund: Is the Middle Dead in VC? | How OpenAI Could Go to Zero?
Jason Lemkin and Rory O’Driscoll debate Anthropic’s $350B valuation, OpenAI’s existential risk, and a16z’s market dominance on 20VC with Harry Stebbings.
- Anthropic grew ARR 10x two consecutive years ($100M → $1B → ~$9-10B), making its $350B valuation comparable to Cloudflare on NTM revenue multiples.
- Lemkin argues OpenAI faces genuine existential risk: it needs $100B over 2-3 years and a macro shock could freeze it while Anthropic and Gemini keep compounding.
- Claude has won the enterprise API market; Claude Code is now directly competing with Cursor, which faces a scorpion-frog dynamic as its own model supplier could limit or clone it.
- New Gemini models triggered a 22% drop in ChatGPT usage; consumer AI loyalty is weaker than assumed.
- a16z raised 22% of all 2025 venture dollars with its $15B fund while simultaneously holding top-quartile returns and the strongest founder brand — Lemkin says doing both at scale is rare.
- ElevenLabs hit $330M ARR but Lemkin considers the $11B valuation fragile due to substitution risk; he burned $30 in credits in 48 hours on a small game prototype.
- California’s proposed wealth tax, structured around voting-control share estimates rather than actual ownership, could assess founders at 5-10x their real economic stake, making the effective rate punitive enough to trigger exits before Series B.
- Lemkin predicts the wealth tax is phase one of a plan to lower the threshold to $25-50M of paper net worth annually, which he says would create a Detroit-style slow exodus from Silicon Valley.
2026-01-15 · Watch on YouTube
