20VC: Trillion or Bust: The New VC Game | Coreweave Sell-Off Creates Panic | Town at $1B, Anduril at $90B: Revenue Multiples Out of Control | General Atlantic Eyes IPO & Modal Raises $750M at $15.75B
October 22, 2026
AI Summary
5 min read“You gotta have billion dollar positions in everything in big boy venture today,” says Jason Lemkin early in this episode of 20VC. “There’s no point in investing otherwise with large funds.” That blunt arithmetic drives the entire conversation among host Harry Stebbings, Lemkin (SaaStr), and Rory O’Driscoll (Scale Venture Partners). They cover a dizzying week in tech—CoreWeave’s sell-off, Anthropic’s slowing growth, Modal’s $15.75B round, Anduril at $90B, and Town at a $1B valuation—but the throughline is a single uncomfortable question: Has venture capital become a winner-take-all game where only trillion-dollar fantasies get funded, leaving everything else unfundable?
The Broken Middle: Why Top-Decile Companies Can’t Raise
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What you'll learn
- 1 (04:25) **Is Venture Capital Broken for "Good" Companies?** - Harry describes a $20M ARR company growing 600-700% that can't get VC meetings, sparking a debate on whether the venture model is broken.
- 2 (08:42) **The Billion-Dollar Position Imperative for Mega-Funds** - The panel explains why large funds must target billion-dollar positions, making many otherwise great deals uninteresting.
- 3 (11:11) **Is Early-Stage Investing Broken by High Entry Prices?** - The group debates whether seed and early-stage returns are structurally inverted versus growth-stage returns.
- 4 (13:24) **CoreWeave's Sell-Off: Are the AI Cracks Showing?** - The panel analyzes CoreWeave's 15-20% drop and what it signals about the AI infrastructure trade.
- 5 (18:56) **Anthropic's Numbers: Growth Slows, IPO Price Drops** - The group examines Anthropic's Q3 results and the rumored IPO price shift from $2T to $1.5T.
- 6 (23:27) **Replit's Default Switch: What It Really Tells Us About LLM Economics** - The panel decodes the media narrative around Replit making OpenAI its default model.
- 7 (26:45) **Claude Code Review: The Most Important Category in Software** - The group discusses Anthropic's new code review tool and what it means for the ecosystem.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
AGENDA:
04:20 Billion-Dollar Bets or Nothing: Why VCs Are Rejecting Fast-Growing Startups
13:20 CoreWeave Sell-Off Sparks Fears of Cracks in AI Boom
18:50 Anthropic's IPO Valuation Could Fall From $2 TRN to $1.5 TRN
32:10 Modal Raises $750M at a $15.75B Valuation as Inference Booms
35:50 Town at $1B, Anduril at $90B: Have Startup Valuations Lost Touch?
42:15 Berkshire Hathaway Doubles Down on Bending Spoons
45:05 37signals' Profit Machine Challenges the Venture Capital Model
49:20 General Atlantic Eyes an IPO; Harvard's Endowment Hits $68B
54:15 Elon's Flying Roadster and $10B SpaceX Share Giveaway
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