O'Driscoll: Anthropic's per-share growth is under 5x despite 15x valuation jump
Rory O'Driscoll · Groq’s $20BN NVIDIA Deal | Why Sam Altman Doesn’t Care About Dilution & Invisible Unemployment 2026 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Jan 8, 2026 · at 42:08
Rory O'Driscoll (General Partner at Scale Venture Partners) analyzes how substantial equity dilution reduces actual per-share returns at frontier AI startups like Anthropic.
0:00 / 0:19exact quote · 19.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“In the year when, you know, when Entropic raised money at four or five billion, then there is a 14, then they raised at 60. Your rough math would say four billion to sixty billion is a 15 X. It's just under a five X on a per share basis because you're issuing so much capital to Raise capital and then you're issuing so much capital to employees.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Rory O'Driscoll
O'Driscoll: Nearly all 2020–2021 venture investments will yield 1x or less
“Because if you think everything in 20, 21 was either priced wrong and makes a one X or early and just totally wrong and makes, you know, less than one X, let's just say, right? Other than a few companies that were the early precursors of AI”
O'Driscoll: AI reverse acqui-hires are regulatory shams leaving dead target companies
“We actually, in both of those cases, that's a pure pretense to get the government off of us, right? Everyone knows both of these companies are toast because in the case of Scale AI, in theory, Meta owns 50% of it, and in theory, their business is selling to ev…”
O'Driscoll: OpenAI misses next year's revenue target by 40% if growth matches Google
“If all OpenAI is, Is just as good as Google, then it's going to miss its number next year by about 40%.”
O'Driscoll: Displacing Overeducated Young Elites Triggers Major Political Instability
“You can have dispossessed urban poor forever, and nothing happens, but if you piss off the twenty-something-year-old middle class, the overeducated elites, they tend to cause trouble.”
O'Driscoll: Oracle will lay off 20k to 30k employees over AI capex strain
“The only person that's even struggling slightly to cover their nut is Oracle, right? Because they had the weakest balance sheet and the least compelling use case, which is why at some point they're going to throw 20 or 30,000 people over the side to make the P…”