The Ledger
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Laffont: AI ecosystem revenue will hit $300B this year and double next
“We believe that it's about a hundred forty billion today. It'll be about three hundred billion this year, and it'll double in twenty-twenty-seven.”
Lafont: Apple stock would rise if it acquired OpenAI for $500B
“I actually think it would go up, not down, even if they did something like that.”
Lafont: Anthropic captured 70% of public SaaS net new ARR in Q1
“I think, and this is order of magnitude correct, that Anthropic in Q-one added 70% of the net new ARR in the SaaS industry, right, defined by public SaaS companies, right?”
Laffont: SpaceX will go public in the next few weeks
“That doesn't include three companies that we know will be coming public pretty shortly, SpaceX obviously in the next few weeks, and we know Anthropic just today, the headlines hit that they've submitted confidentially for their S-one.”
Laffont: Top AI platform revenue could surpass Microsoft by 2028
“We estimate that only, not only is it bigger than Azure, but by the end of the year it could be bigger than AWS and potentially bigger than all of Microsoft. By twenty-twenty-eight.”
Laffont: Anthropic is scaling faster than any previous tech company
“Anthropic in particular is scaling like no other company that we've ever seen.”
Laffont: Centacorns have a 31% chance of 10x-ing to $1 Trillion
“So the data showed us that if you're a unicorn, the odds of you one day becoming a Decacorn are about eight percent. If you're a Decacorn, so that means you're over ten billion, the odds of you becoming a hundred billion dollar company, not much better. Eight …”
Laffont: Starlink will enable worldwide satellite phone calls within a few years
“I believe that within a few years, Starlink will power a device which will actually enable you to make a phone call anywhere in the world.”
Lafont: Nvidia and Tesla are top picks for 5-year AI dominance
“Look, I think to me, number one, I still think NVIDIA, right? I don't see the GPU kind of getting displaced. I see additional architectures kind of coming on board, right? And growing the market. But at the end of the day, all roads still lead to the GPU for a…”
Lafont: ChatGPT maintains over 80% market share against AI rivals
“It really is a dominant kind of franchise, right? It is maintaining 80% plus market share.”
Lafont: A 10x power advantage for China would neutralize US chip superiority
“But if China, if one day China had 10 XR power capacity, it won't even matter, right? Because they'll just have so many more, whether they're not quite the same advanced GPUs or not, they'll just have so many more of them. Their industrial AI capacity will be …”
Laffont: Venture industry faces LP backlash if startups fail to IPO
“If we don't get these companies to go public in my opinion, we are as an industry gonna have to face really hard questions with the ultimate funders of our industry, who, by the way, are not our funds, but are the investors in our funds, right? And eventually,…”
Laffont: Average unicorn valuations are up 70% since September 2024
“We can see that the unicorn economy on average since September of 24 is up 70%.”
Laffont: Average funding raised per unicorn has increased 5x since 2021
“So mathematically, if you put both together, you can see that the funding per unicorn has increased five X since 2021.”
Laffont: Top private tech unicorns represent $4T and outperform the Mag 7
“It represents almost four trillion dollars of value, and has really crushed the traditional kind of mag seven. Almost every single one of these names has outperformed that index.”
Laffont: Launch cadence is top driver of SpaceX valuation
“The number one driver correlated to the valuation of SpaceX is cadence of launches.”
Laffont: Governments and companies will seek to own private satellite constellations
“We believe that a wide variety of companies and governments and militaries will want to own their own constellations so they can control their own destiny.”
Laffont: About 25% of Meta and Google ads are currently AI-enabled
“We estimate, currently, that about a quarter of ads served by Meta and Google are AI-enabled.”
Laffont: Anthropic was reported to have achieved a profitable month
“Shown that Anthropic even had a profitable month, I believe, is what was reported.”
Lafont: One-third of U.S. physicians use Open Evidence daily for diagnoses
“It's Open Evidence, by the way, is the name of the company, and already a third of U.S. Physicians are on the platform using it, you know, 10 times a day to kind of help diagnoses.”
Lafont: Apple's AirPod business revenue is triple OpenAI's total revenue
“To that point it's interesting to think that the AirPod business at Apple is three X opening eyes revenue based today.”
Lafont: Median SaaS revenue growth dropped from 17% in 2021 to 9%
“If you look at SaaS in 2021, The median growth rate for SaaS companies was 17%, and a quarter of those were growing over 25%, ok? If you look at SaaS today, The growth rate has been cut in half, 17% to nine percent, and only five percent of that cohort is now …”
Lafont: 2021 IPO cohort is down 50% after five years
“If you look at the cohort of companies that went IPO in 20, 21, right? And I'm actually not including SPACs in this particular analysis, right? If you look at that cohort T plus one year, The cohort was down about 40% on average, right? Okay, fine. Maybe they …”
Laffont: US TikTok time spent matches Facebook and Instagram combined
“So we get about a hundred million DAUs in the US, but the time spent on the platform is the equivalent of Facebook plus Instagram.”
Lafont: Top five US tech companies will spend $312B on 2025 CapEx
“And we know that in total, 20, 25 CapEx for the top five players in the US is going to be three hundred and twelve billion, right?”
Lafont: US internet companies spend 20x more on CapEx than Chinese peers
“By the way, another really interesting kind of corollary on this point is the US internet companies spend 20 X what the Chinese companies spend on capex.”
Laffont: VC distributions to LPs are near all-time lows
“The distributions from VCs back to their investors are essentially at all time lows. Almost back to financial kind of crisis levels.”
Laffont: More tech companies are valued over $1B privately than publicly
“There's more private companies in tech That are worth more than a billion than public ones.”
Laffont: Post-2020 IPOs destroyed $225B in market cap versus $84B created
“Of all of the IPOs since 2020, if you look at the value created or destroyed from their IPO price, you can see it as a cohort, we've destroyed almost two hundred twenty five billion in market cap, offset by the value creation of 84. So, net negative as a cohor…”
Laffont: Annual IPO volume from 2022 to 2024 fell below 2008 levels
“The fact is that since 2022, both in 22, 23, and 24, we had fewer IPOs than in 2008 and 2009, the depths of the financial crisis, and 2001 and 2002, post the greatest bubble in history in tech.”
Laffont: Databricks' cloud business has reached $500M in ARR
“And he also gave me a non-public data point around his cloud business, which is now five hundred million of ARR, which was almost zero a few years ago.”
Laffont: Memory required per user could quintuple due to AI demands
“So we think ultimately that in this era, the amount of memory per user could quintuple just based on the demand that these AI systems are requiring to provide their services.”
Lafont: LA restaurant recovery lags national average by 50%
“Today a friend just sent me a chart showing the recovery of restaurants post-COVID, and LA is 50% behind on the recovery per store location versus the national average.”
Thomas Lafont claims Apple reduced iPhone share of gross profit from 90% to 40%
“Over a decade ago, 90 plus percent of their gross profit was a one-time hardware sale on the iPhone. And no one thought that they would ever be able to get away from the drug of selling that one iPhone unit, right? And cut to, you know, over a decade later, it…”
Laffont: Down and bridge rounds now make up 63% of venture financing
“The mix of down rounds and bridge rounds as a percent of total rounds is up to almost 63%.”
Laffont: Rate of startup exits or follow-on raises halved for 2021 cohort
“The 20 16 cohort, which is the top slide, the green line, after about 13 quarters, 80% had either raised the new round or exited. So 80%. You can see that in the 20, 21 cohort, that number's down almost in half.”
Laffont: Nvidia's Jensen Huang is Silicon Valley's longest-tenured founder CEO
“And you get to back a founder like Jensen at NVIDIA, who many people don't know, but is the longest tenured founder CEO in Silicon Valley.”