This Week in Startups
This Week in Startups

Why the VC Hype Cycle Always Gets It Wrong | VC Roundtable | E2307

July 1, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

The venture capital roundtable on This Week in Startups convened Aileen Lee (Cowboy VC), Mike Maples (Floodgate), and Ben Lerer (Lerer Hippeau) to assess a market that is simultaneously liquid, frothy, and disorienting. The conversation ranged from the return of venture exits to the distorting effect of $100 million Series A rounds, the rise of open-weight Chinese models, and the growing gap between what multi-stage funds will finance and what actually needs building. The panelists agreed that the AI era has compressed business cycles dramatically, making it hard to separate signal from noise.

The return of liquidity and the changing exit landscape

After a multi-year drought, venture liquidity is picking up. Bending Spoons priced its IPO at $29 per share, above its range, giving it an $18.5 billion non-diluted valuation. The company doubled revenue year over year and posted positive GAAP net income in Q1. Mike Maples called the IPO encouraging, noting that Bending Spoons is a vehicle that has been "gobbling up older companies" — including AOL, Evernote, and Vimeo — and that the market needs more such vehicles because traditional SaaS multiples remain depressed and M&A has been quiet.

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What you'll learn

  • 1 (00:00) **Welcome & Panel Introductions** - Alex Wilhelm introduces the VC Roundtable panel: Aileen Lee (Cowboy VC), Mike Maples (Floodgate), and Ben Lerer (Lerer Hippeau).
  • 2 (02:19) **Social Media Detox & The Compressed AI Cycle** - The panel discusses why Aileen and Ben have largely left Twitter, while Mike and Alex remain active.
  • 3 (05:14) **Liquidity, LP Sentiment & The Denominator Effect** - The panel assesses how recent venture liquidity is affecting fundraising and LP relationships.
  • 4 (09:04) **Bending Spoons IPO & The Pre-AI Company Problem** - The panel analyzes the Bending Spoons IPO as a potential liquidity vehicle for older, pre-AI unicorns.
  • 5 (12:09) **The Ignite Exit & PE as a Liquidity Option** - Mike shares the story of Floodgate-backed Ignite selling to PE for $1.5B, and the panel debates when to take such offers.
  • 6 (19:30) **Burning the Boats: The Mutiny Case Study** - Aileen details how portfolio company Mutiny burned the boats to become AI-native, and the panel discusses the difficulty of such pivots.
  • 7 (24:55) **The New Growth Bar: Quintuple, Quadruple, Not Triple, Triple** - The panel discusses how AI has raised the bar for growth rates needed to raise venture capital.

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Show Notes

This Week In Startups is made possible by:


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Today’s show:

Forget the triple-triple-double-double-double; the new bar for startups hoping to raise venture capital has reached the stratosphere, though our venture panel is worried that startups are focusing too much on today’s problems that may not become companies tomorrow. During a lively VC roundtable, Cowboy’s Aileen Lee, Floodgate’s Mike Maples, and Lerer Hippeau’s Ben Lerer joined Alex to dig into exiting pre-AI startups, rising valuations, token spend, why they are keeping their funds small, and whether the government just tripped OpenAI and Anthropic!


Guest Links:

Aileen Lee https://x.com/aileenlee

Cowboy VC https://cowboy.vc

Mike Maples https://x.com/m2jr

Floodgate https://www.floodgate.com

Bene Lerer https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjlerer

Lere Hippeau https://www.lererhippeau.com


Timestamps:

0:00 Aileen Lee, Mike Maples, and Ben Lerer join the show

5:13 Venture liquidity returns: what SpaceX/Stripe distributions mean for LPs

9:13 Bending Spoons prices IPO at $29/sha

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