Michael Burry Shorts NVIDIA and Palantir & Has Defensibility Died in a World of AI?
Jason Lemkin and Rory O’Driscoll on Gamma’s $100M raise, Michael Burry’s Nvidia/Palantir short, and why defensibility is dead in AI.
- Gamma raised $100M at $2.1B valuation, hit $100M ARR with 50 employees in under 12 months from near-zero revenue.
- Michael Burry’s $1.1B Nvidia/Palantir put position required the stock to drop from $188 to below $160 within 47 days just to 2x; Lemkin calls the timing requirement nearly impossible.
- Anthropic projects $7B ARR by 2028; OpenAI targeting $20B ARR in 2025 — both seen as evidence AI revenue is already materializing.
- Datadog stock surged 23% with 15M+ AI-native customers; thesis: attach to hyperscaler compute budgets, not just product AI features.
- Sequoia’s leadership transition (Rolof Botha out, Pat Grady and Alfred Lynn in) read by Lemkin and O’Driscoll as internal dissatisfaction over missed AI deals like Cursor.
- Lemkin: 2024 was the co-pilot year (failed); 2025 is AI-that-works year; 2026 will be AI-as-team-member year — Replit V3 cited as first agent crossing that line.
- Fundraising is maximally binary: AI-native top-decile growth gets funded; classic SaaS triple-triple-double-double went from 5 term sheets to 1 at a 10M round on $40M post.
- Hummingbird VC cited as underrated outlier — $800M position at IPO of Billion to One from a sub-$150M fund.
2025-11-13 · Watch on YouTube
