Sam Altman's Masterplan or a Gift to Anthropic? Palantir & Shopify Crush Earnings

Harry Stebbings, Rory O’Driscoll, and Jason Lemkin debate GPT-5’s underwhelming launch, Palantir’s 108x ARR valuation, and Shopify’s 91% revenue growth with 30% fewer staff.

• Shopify grew revenue 91% since 2022 peak while cutting headcount from 11,600 to 8,100 — Lemkin calls Tobi’s approach ruthless and replicable.
• Palantir trades at ~108x ARR vs. Shopify at ~17.9x; O’Driscoll ranks Palantir #1 on unpenetrated opportunity despite the valuation gap.
• GPT-5 is 8-10x cheaper per token than top Anthropic models, which Rory frames as OpenAI directly attacking Anthropic’s $6B+ coding revenue.
• N8N raised at $3B on ~$40M ARR (ending year at $80M), a ~75x multiple driven by rapid AI workflow co-attachment in under 9 months.
• ChatGPT has ~700M free users and 20-30M paying subscribers at $20/month; Perplexity’s Chrome bid logic is replicating that conversion funnel at browser scale.
• Carter Q2 2025 data: seed valuations at all-time highs but fewer deals done; OpenAI’s $40B Q1 raise exceeded Scale’s entire B2B enterprise deal universe for the quarter.
• Lemkin’s SaaStr runs ~$20M revenue with 2 employees and 10 AIs; O’Driscoll calls ‘chief orchestration officer’ the highest-value new job title today.

2025-08-14 · Watch on YouTube