O'Driscoll: Price hardly matters in winning VC deals unlike PE buyouts
Rory O'Driscoll · Stripe's $8B OpenRouter Bet | Anthropic's First Profit & The Math Behind Reaching $600B in Revenue? · Aug 20, 2026 · at 50:40
Rory O'Driscoll (Scale Venture Partners) contrasts high-valuation AI venture rounds with the strict price sensitivity and financial modeling of PE software buyouts.
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“In venture deals, if you're in the right thing, it almost doesn't matter what you paid. You see cursor for details, see open router for details, right? This is the exact opposite. This is fine, precise financial engineering. If you're wrong by 20%, 30% on price, you know, your IRR dips from 20, which is totally acceptable at scale, to low teens, in which case you wish you hadn't done the deal.”
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