GoKawiilThis week at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event in Athens — part of the Panathenea festival taking place in the city — I sat down with Niko Bonatsos of Verdict Capital, Andreas Stavropoulos of Threshold Ventures, and Ben Blume of Atomico to ask about the current state of venture investing, the wave of mega-IPOs that SpaceX is about to kick off, and where they still see an ocean of opportunity. Our conversation, following, has been edited for length and clarity. You can check out the full discussion at page bottom.
With SpaceX reportedly eyeing a $1.75 trillion valuation at IPO, and OpenAI and Anthropic potentially not far behind, what will the impacts be on the broader market?
Andreas Stavropoulos: I remember how exciting the Google IPO was, and how it ushered in a reopening of a market that had been very pessimistic about tech in the early 2000s — how it was an enabling event that brought in a whole new generation of entrepreneurs. The same thing is happening now. With every subsequent wave of paradigm shifts, the scale changes by orders of magnitude, and that’s to be expected. What business today in the information age is not a technology business?
Ben Blume: These are phenomenal companies, and with each one of these scale liquidity events, they generate wealth and returns that go back into the next generation of companies.
Niko Bonatsos: My co-founder at Verdict was the first-ever investor in what is now known as Cursor. So if Elon feels like he’s [having] a good moment, maybe Cursor [which Musk revealed recently that he has the option to acquire for $60 billion] will have some good news too. But more broadly, for the next next generation of companies, as Andreas mentioned, they could be going after much larger markets, and immigrant founders, as we know, they’re the ones who dream really big, they have nothing to lose, and they can go the distance, and Elon Musk is an immigrant founder himself. So, for those of us who come from Greece or other smaller markets, wow, you know, that’s a great example.
Some have suggested SpaceX at that valuation could soak up so much public market capital that it hurts companies going out in its wake. Is that a real concern?
Stavropoulos: You can choose to see most things as optimistic or pessimistic and make very good arguments for both. Something like a SpaceX, macro-wise, is going to end up bringing more people into the market than the short-term impact of soaking up some liquidity. Consumer involvement in markets in the last 30 years has gone from something that wasn’t really a thing to something people trade on their phones every day. Those numbers add up.
Blume: SpaceX is such a one-of-one company. For a long time, space has been a government and public sector domain. To give investors real financial access to it — I think that’s going to capture a widespread imagination. It may mentally draw from longer-tail allocations that might otherwise have gone into the next 20 or 30 software businesses, but I think the interest it generates more than compensates.
Is the current flood of capital into AI justified by future earnings, or is this a case of extreme FOMO?
Bonatsos: If you’re an AI-native founder or a company in the American dynamism space right now, you can live life in the fast lane. If you’re not in one of those two buckets, it’s really tough. In 17 years in Silicon Valley, I’ve never seen more groupthink. Three quarters of all venture capital raised over the last year went into five companies. Today, if you’re a 40-year-old tenured professor at Stanford not building something in AI, no one wants to meet you.
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