00:21:04 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[00:21:04] S0: Think it's Let [00:21:04] S1: me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Yeah. You're not going get these type of these type of debates on less wrong. The most mind blowing stat semi analysis has seen about the Anthropic s one is as of 06/30/2026 quote, we had raised an aggregate of a $141,000,000,000 of capital and had cash and cash equivalents of a 112,400,000,000 and short term investments of 19.3. Means today they've burned 9,800,000,000. They're growing at rapid pace and are profitable on an operating income basis as of June quarter. This is likely the most efficient scaling of a business in the history of capitalism. Well, we have two folks from Semi Analysis coming on the show at noon, Doug O'Laughlin, Joey Brookhart. I'm very interested to understand because Doug is obsessed with the railroad build out and I feel like this might be an example. [00:22:01] S0: Well, I don't it's it's trains generally.
00:22:06 · John Coogan
[00:22:06] S1: But he he has made he has made comparisons to from the AI build out to the railroad build out. But I don't know that there was a a railroad company that was this capital efficient during the railroad build out. Like You might need another analogy of some sort. Don't know. Very interesting. Maybe this is more like Google in the tech in the first internet build out. So when is this going out? What do we know? What don't we know? We know the ticker dollar sign ant obviously reference to Santa Claus. Yes. But we don't know how much the raising is rumored to be a 100,000,000,000. We don't know the valuation. People are saying somewhere between 1.5 or 2,000,000,000,000. 2,000,000,000,000 feels like it's on the table now. When the market was selling off and there was like a lot of discussion over the revenue deceleration, there was a question about will they need to pull it back. Probably still could. It doesn't really matter at the end of the day. It's still huge up round based on the last evaluation, puts a bunch of money on the balance sheet. Whether it's 5% dilution, 7% dilution, not the biggest deal. The IPO should be happening the week of November 16. As a reminder, we will be at tomorrow x around that time and it should be an incredible time for us to be doing the show because we have an insane guest lineup with some of the biggest greatest capital allocators in tech and business. And so we will be able to get everyone's take live as this is progressing whether even if it's delayed another week, we're going to have a lot of great stuff to talk about as everyone gets ready to position, maybe go long, give their thesis, give their take, maybe they're already in Anthropic, maybe they bought IPO shares. Risk factors. Nick Carter sharing a satirical risk factor. What does he actually say? People are talking about time travel and stuff. What else is in there? The only one, I mean everyone sort of knew that the IPO risk factor was going have catastrophic risk, sort of like the AI doom, the doom scenario. It did make it into the s one. The market seems to have digested it and been like, yeah, we know. Yeah. You guys have been talking about this for a long time. We're still gonna underwrite it. Like there's not really anything you can change about your underwriting. You're not gonna put that in your DCF.
00:24:21 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays
You're just gonna say, okay, I hope that doesn't happen. What's interesting is like it's not even like a cost line item. Like, we've seen the the marketing dollars scaled significantly. So in 2023, they spent just $2,000,000. I'd love to know what they were spending $2,000,000 on in 2023 for ads. Was that like was that like Facebook ads or something? Like, what were they advertising? Don't remember there any [00:24:45] S0: Could have been [00:24:45] S1: quad ads in 2023. Yeah. Because they were sort of like they just But couldn't [00:24:50] S0: you couldn't you bundle like events? [00:24:52] S1: Maybe. Maybe. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe they did like a Dev Day or something. But then it started ballooning. So in 2025, they spent 568,000,000 and then first half twenty twenty six, they're spending $3,170,000,000 on marketing. Lots of money on marketing. I didn't see a line on safety. I didn't see like a blind item on like how much are they spending on AI safety, which is sort of interesting. I don't know if I just missed it. But if you're putting the catastrophic scenario in the risk factors, you would think that that would also flow to other parts of the income statement as a cost item because you would say, look, like one of the weird things about this business is that we invest a lot of compute, a lot of cost, a lot of headcount in AI safety. And so expect that to grow with revenue or expect that to grow with headcount or expect that to They're grow doing great. You mentioned, what, 6,000,000 per employee revenue scale or something like that?
00:24:52 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays
[00:24:52] S1: Maybe. Maybe. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe they did like a Dev Day or something. But then it started ballooning. So in 2025, they spent 568,000,000 and then first half twenty twenty six, they're spending $3,170,000,000 on marketing. Lots of money on marketing. I didn't see a line on safety. I didn't see like a blind item on like how much are they spending on AI safety, which is sort of interesting. I don't know if I just missed it. But if you're putting the catastrophic scenario in the risk factors, you would think that that would also flow to other parts of the income statement as a cost item because you would say, look, like one of the weird things about this business is that we invest a lot of compute, a lot of cost, a lot of headcount in AI safety. And so expect that to grow with revenue or expect that to grow with headcount or expect that to They're grow doing great. You mentioned, what, 6,000,000 per employee revenue scale or something like that? [00:25:47] S0: Yeah. Somewhere around there. Yeah. It's interesting how many billions of very, very anti ads as a business model but a lover of ads as a business. [00:25:58] S1: Oh, interesting. [00:25:59] S0: Yeah, yeah. Billions. Probably makes them the number one advertiser, Like one of the certainly the number one advertiser in AI. I would be surprised if, you know, Google could have topped that, maybe. Who knows? No,
00:25:59 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[00:25:59] S0: Yeah, yeah. Billions. Probably makes them the number one advertiser, Like one of the certainly the number one advertiser in AI. I would be surprised if, you know, Google could have topped that, maybe. Who knows? No, [00:26:16] S1: no, no. That is a very, very interesting scenario. Anyway, what else? They have a $125,000,000,000 equipment lease with Broadcom. 48% of revenue is coming through the cloud marketplaces. So that was something people were talking about, how much is accounted for in that different revenue recognition way. It doesn't really matter when you look at the operating income. Clearly, factors that out. But that was a question that people had. And then AI accelerating beyond its limits to... [00:26:48] S0: We've to give a round of applause to Spark Capital. [00:26:52] S1: Oh, yeah. Huge. [00:26:53] S0: The VAC pulled out the amount that they had invested at different points or at least an estimate of that. And you can see they started by leading the Series C, which they have 131 X on, and then they just kept doubling down through D through H. Total of $777,000,000 invested, which would give them roughly an $18,000,000,000 stake at a $2,000,000,000,000 market cap. So really fantastic return, early conviction. And Yasmeen is the only venture capitalist on the board. Yeah. So I... You know what I'm you know what I'm thinking? What? Top of the Midas list. [00:27:38] S1: Oh, for sure. [00:27:40] S0: Yeah. Like, she should probably just jump straight to the front.
00:27:40 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[00:27:40] S0: Yeah. Like, she should probably just jump straight to the front. [00:27:43] S1: Yeah. Hard to make an argument against that. That's pretty... Yeah. It's like it's not just the return because I think it's like a [00:27:51] S0: 20 Does it percent seem like [00:27:52] S1: at scale? [00:27:52] S0: I think with the Midas List, you gotta you gotta do a lot of work to get that and and who knows? But yeah. Doesn't seem like she'd be somebody... She's been like pretty humble More about the whole [00:28:03] S1: unique and more Midas list worthy about not just printing 20,000,000,000 on a billion in or 700,000,000 in, but being the only VC to do it and get the board seat and do it at that time. It's so [00:28:17] S0: you Straight to the top. [00:28:18] S1: And you would put Sam Bank and Freed number two? [00:28:21] S0: No. No. No. No. You get You get You get DQ'd if you're in If [00:28:25] S1: you're in prison? Yeah. Ineligible. Yeah. Maybe they could just do the thing where they put his picture where they put the bars like a little bar overlay. You don't think so? [00:28:33] S0: No. That's wrong. Okay. But my vote is Yasmin straight to the top. [00:28:36] S1: Okay. Straight to Yeah. The Fantastic. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. [00:28:47] S0: Okay. So [00:28:48] S1: So they got [00:28:49] S0: hacked. Yeah. So Cathedral, you know what they were trying to do.