OpenAI Buys TBPN & Their Management Team Reboot | Mercor Hack & Why Now is the Time for Cyber

Jason Lemkin and Rory O’Driscoll argue Anthropic’s $30B ARR at a quarter of OpenAI’s training costs makes the $820B OpenAI valuation look dangerously overpriced.

• Anthropic hit $30B ARR, up from $9B at year-start, while its model training costs are reportedly one-quarter of OpenAI’s — a compounding cost+growth advantage Lemkin calls a ‘double code red’ for OpenAI.
• Lemkin argues OpenAI investors at the ~$820B valuation got a materially worse deal than Anthropic investors at $370B, given near-equal revenue and better Anthropic trajectory.
• OpenAI’s management reboot: COO moved to special projects, CMO and CRO out, head of apps on medical leave; Denise Dresser (ex-Slack CEO) handed all go-to-market with Lemkin giving her a 30% success probability given the turmoil.
• All three hosts called the TBPN acquisition a vanity project contradicting OpenAI’s own ‘code red focus’ edict; Rory noted media ownership historically costs more time than value delivered, citing Jeff Bezos as cautionary example.
• Mercor was hit by ransomware group ‘Latipus,’ lost Meta as a customer; Lemkin says hyperscalers have zero tolerance for third-party security breaches and called it ‘potentially fatal’ given fungibility of data-labeling vendors.
• Rory and Lemkin warn AI-powered attack automation will devastate underprepared B2B startups — ‘hacker farms of AI agents cranking 24/7’ replacing human hacker farms.
• A two-person company reached $1.8B revenue selling GLP-1s via AI-generated personalized marketing at scale; Lemkin frames it as a preview of agentic marketing tactics that will become standard within two years.
• Supabase targeting $10B valuation; panelists note AI agents now create more databases than humans, making Supabase’s embedded-database model a structural winner in the vibe-coding era.

2026-04-09 · Watch on YouTube