Hello. Welcome to the first edition of VC Insider! We’re excited to land in your inbox every Thursday. We’ve been covering venture capital for a long time, but we’ve never seen a pace of dealmaking like this, with such eye-popping valuations.
Each week, we’ll make sense of the biggest stories in VC and get beyond the chatter to reveal what Silicon Valley’s sharpest minds are actually thinking, not just what they’re posting on X or LinkedIn. -Ben and Katie This week is SF Tech Week here in San Francisco, aka Andreessen Horowitz marketing week. The free flood and drinks are flowing, and for some reason, there are two blimps floating over the Bay.
It turns out that AI hasn’t replaced human networking…yet. Topics du jour include: Is SaaS making a comeback? Why is there so much drama between Factory AI and Cognition? How do I get into Claude Founder House? With some 2,000 events, there is always a better one you’re hearing about around the corner. The FOMO is real.
We’re biased, but we think the best event was our Tech Insider: Growth Mode town hall, where one of Anthropic’s biggest investors weighed in on the upcoming IPO. Somehow, I ended up with two sisters of famous tech founders.
My tweet this week about “Zuck’s sister” DJing in a rooftop penthouse at the FARR Summit went viral, with many people adding she does have a name of her own and is a successful VC in her own right. Sorry, Arielle Zuckerberg!
(Arielle later chimed in to add she has been DJing since 2018 at Burning Man and small festivals.) Tuesday, I interviewed Ginger Luckey Gaetz, the sister of Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, who is an advisor to the government of El Salvador. Interestingly, when I asked what company she wished she had invested in, she said it was Anduril.
She said she was prohibited from investing because her husband, Matt Gaetz, was a US congressman. If startup investing isn’t a gamble enough for you, I’m co-hosting a poker tournament with $10,000 at stake tonight at the Foundry. I will donate any winnings to charity, so wish me luck! -Ben Last night, Ben sat down with Menlo Ventures partner Matt Murphy, an early investor in Anthropic.
If the listing goes well, Menlo will be one of the biggest winners, turning an estimated $1 billion investment into around $25 billion at a $2 trillion valuation. The firm has invested in every round since 2023. Not surprisingly, Murphy remains extremely bullish.
He shrugged off leaked financials obtained by Reuters showing Anthropic racked up an eye-watering $8 billion in operating losses last year, saying investors should wait for the company’s S-1 before judging the business. “If I could buy more, I would,” Murphy said. He also pushed back on the idea that Chinese open-weight models are poised to commoditize the biggest AI labs.
His argument is that the market has moved beyond experimentation and into optimization, with companies increasingly focused on cutting costs, post-training models, and routing work to the right system. Menlo is betting heavily on that infrastructure layer — compute, inference, routing, and optimization — which Murphy said has accounted for roughly 60% to 70% of the firm’s AI investments.
As for finding the next Anthropic, Murphy was blunt: “I don’t think there’s going to be another Anthropic.” That doesn’t mean he sees no froth. Murphy called neo-labs and robotics “super interesting,” but warned that some startups are raising $100 million or even billion-dollar rounds before showing much real…
