Thrive Raises New $10B Fund | OpenAI Buys OpenClaw | Stripe at $140B: Is Adyen Wildly Undervalued?
Jason Lemkin and Rory O’Driscoll on Anthropic’s $30B raise, SaaS’s collapse under AI narrative pressure, and why Corporate America will will AI ROI into existence regardless of results.
- Anthropic raised $30B at $380B post-money, up from an initial $10B target, with unprecedented 10x ARR growth for 3 consecutive years.
- Anthropic grew from ~5% of OpenAI’s revenue to 64% in 14 months, driven by enterprise and coding use cases.
- Public SaaS stocks as a cohort are near 10% blended growth; if AI cuts that another 30%, the sector enters a structural dead zone.
- Lemkin argues Fortune 500 will collectively will AI headcount replacement into existence even before ROI is proven, creating 1-2 years of forced mega-spend.
- Shopify bear case: agentic commerce could bypass the Shopify UI entirely, threatening its software layer even if payments/GMV plumbing survives near-term.
- Thrive’s $10B growth fund logic: as companies like Stripe, Databricks, and OpenAI stay private at $100B+ valuations, growth funds must scale proportionally to maintain ownership stakes.
- Workday founder Aneel Bhusri returned as CEO after under a year away, signaling that AI product roadmap rewrites require founder-specific institutional memory, not generic executive playbooks.
- Monday.com at 3.8B market cap (~10x free cash flow, 27% growth) is a screaming value buy if revenue proves durable — but SMB churn accelerates faster than enterprise, making durability the open question.
2026-02-19 · Watch on YouTube
