Jun 18, 2026 · 1h 28m · news
Anthropic's Fable Banned by US Government | Wix & Adobe Hit All-Time Lows | Mistral Raising at $20BN · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of 20VC, host Harry Stebbings and his co-hosts analyze monumental shifts in the tech ecosystem, including SpaceX's historic IPO, the regulatory fallout from the US government's ban on Anthropic's Claude Fable, and the structural decline of legacy SaaS compared to AI-native platforms.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Harry holds 8.6% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Harry as informed peer 3.3 Guest teaching 4.5 Guest disagreement 1.7 Harry pushing back 3.0
speaking balance: gold is Harry, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 50:58 Ev characterizes non-pivoting SaaS equity as worthless
Ev aggressively rejects conventional valuations for legacy software companies, calling slow-growing pre-AI SaaS businesses zombie companies with essentially worthless equity.
Hardest push from Harry ▶ 45:27 Harry confronts Benchmark on missing model providersHarry puts Ev on the spot by asking how Benchmark justifies not investing early in foundation model providers despite claiming to be a premier Silicon Valley firm.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 3:52 Ev educates host on options market dynamicsIn response to Harry's question, Ev details how call options force market makers to buy underlying stock, creating self-reinforcing gamma squeezes in low float shares.
Harry holds his own ▶ 12:01 Harry details Cursor deal metrics and compute contractsHarry demonstrates strong market expertise by calling out precise valuation numbers, revenue trajectory, and team retention structures for the Cursor deal.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Harry as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Harry pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SpaceX's Historic IPO, Gamma Squeezes, and Elon Musk's Capital Advantage | 4 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Harry prompts the guests on SpaceX's historic valuation and options trading, leading Ev to explain gamma squeezes and float mechanics. Ev and Rory elaborate collaboratively on Elon Musk's capital advantage without friction. | |
| Anthropic's Claude Fable Ban and the Regulatory Rubicon | 3 | 4 | 2 | 3 | The guests analyze Anthropic's Claude Fable government ban and national security implications. Harry keeps the conversation moving with macro questions while the guests provide detailed geopolitical and technical analysis. | |
| Mistral AI, Sovereign Models, and the Geopolitics of Tech | 4 | 3 | 3 | 7 | Harry directly challenges Ev on Benchmark missing out on early foundation model investments. Ev candidly admits the failure, agreeing it stings despite Benchmark's other successful portfolio companies. | |
| Salesforce's Acquisition of Fin and the Survival of Pre-AI SaaS | 3 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Harry introduces Salesforce's acquisition of Fin (Intercom). Rory and Ev analyze how legacy SaaS businesses must pivot to outcome-based AI pricing models to avoid stagnation. | |
| The "SaaSpocalypse" vs. Semiconductor Supremacy (Wix & Adobe) | 4 | 6 | 2 | 3 | Ev breaks down a comprehensive framework for evaluating public SaaS multiples during the AI transition. Harry participates by contributing comparisons to Squarespace and Webflow. | |
| Robotics, Humanoid vs. Non-Humanoid, and Real-World LLM Edge Cases | 2 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Rory and Ev share deep domain expertise on robotics, evaluating humanoid versus task-specific form factors and edge LLM integration while Harry listens. |
Statements from this episode (29)
Randle: Everyone blindly loyal to Elon Musk has become stupidly rich
“Anyone that has been blindly loyal to Elon, they've all got stupidly rich.”
Randle: US regulating Anthropic's Fable on capabilities is a Rubicon moment
“At the face of it, this is a Rubicon moment in the history of the AI industry. It's the first time that the US has ostensibly regulated an AI model based on capabilities.”
Randle: Outside of China, there are basically no good open-source AI models
“Outside of China, there are basically no good open source models.”
Randle: Benchmark partner says any pre-AI SaaS liquidity is top-decile performance
“There's a partner here at Benchmark that says any liquidity for pre-AI SaaS companies is top decile performance. Any liquidity at all.”
Randle predicts SpaceX stock price will be lower in six months
“I would personally probably take the under in six months, not because I don't think that the company is going to be valued extremely well... But if I had to go over under, I'd go under from six months from now.”
Randle: I lost all my college savings shorting Tesla
“With all of my college savings, I shorted Tesla. And I feel like everyone has gone through this experience. If they were a value investor at some point in their life where it was like, you know, you just, oh my God, Tesla, maybe it's not a fraud, but it's so o…”
O'Driscoll: Musk's low cost of capital enables AI bets no one else can make
“Because his cost of capital is low. That's right. Because no one else could have built, I mean, if you got into your local bank and said, I think AI is going to take off, I have a crackerjack engineering team, I really can build Colossus I and II in less than …”
Randle: Prediction markets show 70% odds of Tesla-SpaceX merger in two years
“If you look at the poly market Calci odds on a Tesla SpaceX merger, again, you know, not, not that those markets are so big that they're that indicative, but I think the probability that they have on there is something like 70% in the next two years or somethi…”
Randle: OpenAI and Google will match Mythos Fable quality within 3-6 months
“When OpenAI or when Google, like, they're going to get to Mythos Fable quality models very soon, within the next three to six months, and then we're going to see.”
Randle: Open models with test-time compute match Fable's security vulnerability finding
“With the right harness and the right amount of test time compute, you can use open models to find all of the vulnerabilities that Fable can find.”
O'Driscoll: US AI restrictions will prove unsustainable within 24 months
“And you're right, what it points to is this is going to be an unsustainable medium-term position, right? It's hard to imagine, like, unless the US government really wants to start regulating AI up and down the board, this is going to be, it's going to sound li…”
Randle: Frontier AI models can now autonomously execute cyber attacks
“Zooming out, I think the most important thing in all this Is that we step back from Anthropic and realize that the models are to place now, whether they're from Anthropic or elsewhere, where they can autonomously find and chain multiple vulnerabilities togethe…”
O'Driscoll: Anthropic still has over 50% chance of IPOing this year
“I mean, statistically, more than 50%, yes, because in a world where this doesn't get solved for four or five months, there's so many other problems that our heads are gonna hurt, right? So you have to say, if a problem, in a world where it does get solved, the…”
Randle: Mistral AI has fallen very far behind on model development
“Like Mr. All itself has fallen very far behind on, on the actual model side, and they've done a very good job becoming this inference platform and the FDE model and all these things, but they're outside of China.”
O'Driscoll: AI frontier market will consolidate into 2-3 US players
“Fast forward five years, you know, unless the U.S. Is ludicrously obnoxious in its sovereignty acts, it should be a small oligopoly like Cloud of two to three players in the U.S. With some kind of affiliations in Europe, and that is the likely structure of the…”
Randle: Benchmark missing early AI model providers was a complete failure
“No, it fucking sucks. It's terrible. It's a complete and utter failure on, on our part. And I think we, we'd all say that.”
Randle: Legacy SaaS growing 7% with no AI strategy is a zombie
“And what Owen did, and what the whole team at Intercom did, or Finn did, is they took a situation where the equity of the company was essentially worthless because no, no one's gonna buy 300 growing seven. It just, you know, it's just not, it's not a SaaS asse…”
Stebbings: Wix slashes 2026 guidance and cuts 20% of workforce
“Wix slashes twenty-twenty-six guidance, cutting 20% of staff, a thousand employees, And cuts outlook by fifty million and revenue by twenty five million.”
Randle: Top public SaaS platforms trade above 15x NTM revenue
“You have, I mean, Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, Cloudflare, Datadog, Palantir, all these companies trade above 15 times NTM revenue again.”
Randle: Dominant software incumbents have only market share to lose to AI
“If you're already the market leader and you only have share to lose if you're already the incumbent, that's a really tough place to be because there's not really share to gain, there's only share to lose, and AI is a great way to for startups to take share fro…”
Randle: Adobe trades at eight times LTM free cash flow
“I looked at Adobe and I was like, this thing trades for eight times LTM free cash flow.”
Randle: Cloud index down 44% over five years while semis rose 325%
“The Bessemer Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index over the last five years is down 44%, and the SOX, the iShare Semiconductor ETF is up 325%.”
O'Driscoll: Semiconductor stocks will crash hard if CapEx flattens out
“The catalyst on the semiconductor CapEx trend is a flattening out in CapEx. If that happens, then all bets are off, and those things are going to go down so fast and hard.”
O'Driscoll: Adobe operates like a PE firm milking its users
“My vent on that company is they have milked their users for so long that it just feels a piece of financial engineering interacting with the product. It's always the login are crap. I don't even understand the licensing model. I don't even know what I can use …”
Randle: Legacy SaaS incumbents can no longer afford top AI startups
“And now every single good AI company that they could acquire is too big for them to acquire and they can't do it. And so then it's like, well, we don't have the talent internally. We can't build a good AI product portfolio because we don't have the talent. The…”
O'Driscoll: Humanoid robots are overkill for short-term industrial tasks
“The case they articulated against humanoids in the short term I think is more correct than not, which is it's overkill for many industrial practices, and what you really want is a thing that can see, that can pick things out, can flexibly be trained very quick…”
Randle: Robotics is a prime candidate to produce trillion-dollar companies
“We think it's in, in terms of the things that are still in the first inning that are going to become trillion dollar, you know, we're trillion dollar companies are going to be produced. We think it's one of the prime candidates for sure.”
O'Driscoll: Locus Robotics has 15,000 deployed robots and $180M revenue
“I'm on the board of Locust Robotics. We have 15,000 robots in the field. We do, kind of, a hundred eighty million dollars a year, right?”
O'Driscoll: Robots have replaced under 1% of manual labor globally
“The total number of robots in the world today, like, in total, about three million, right? And there's, you know, there's a billion people doing real work, right? So, you know, and those robots have been around, yeah, arms have been around for 20 or 30 years. …”