Jason Kirby

Thunder.vc is a tech-enabled investment banking improving on the grueling process of raising capital. We want founders and GPs focused on building great companies and less about chasing investors. Here's a quick blurb on what we're building youtube.com/watch?v=jQC3G6…

Moda Let's see how your works

@Teslaconomics Who cleans up the vomit on a Friday night?

I plan on owning my own Tesla Robotaxi fleet one day. And the more I run the numbers, the more I realize this new business could become one of the most powerful income opportunities I've ever seen. This is how I'm thinking about it. Based on many analyst models and Tesla’s long-term vision, a reasonable base case assumption is about ~$30,000 per year in net profit per Robotaxi to the owner. This is after things like Tesla’s platform fee, charging, tires, maintenance, insurance, and cleaning. Of course, the network is still early and Tesla is just beginning to roll this out in pilot programs in a few cities, so there’s no official real-world owner earnings yet... but using reasonable assumptions around utilization, pricing per mile, and operating costs, the math starts to get really interesting. If one Robotaxi can earn around $30,000 per year, here’s what a fleet might look like: • $100,000 per year → about 4 Robotaxis • $500,000 per year → about 17 Robotaxis • $1,000,000 per year → about 34 Robotaxis It may sound a bit crazy at first, but when you break it down, it starts to make more sense. These vehicles could potentially drive 50,000 to 100,000+ miles per year in high demand areas. If the economics land somewhere around $0.25-$0.50 profit per mile after all costs, you end up right around that ~$30k per vehicle per year range. And remember, the Tesla’s Robotaxi network is going to work a lot like Airbnb for cars. You add your vehicle to the network, Tesla handles the software, routing, payments, and rider experience, and they take a platform fee (often modeled around 25-35%). The owner keeps the rest after operating costs. Another thing that makes this interesting is the expected cost of the vehicles themselves. Tesla has talked about the purpose-built Cybercabs costing roughly $25k-$30k and Elon told me production is starting in 1 month! If that’s even close to reality, a fleet capable of generating around $1 million per year could theoretically cost somewhere around $850k-$1M in vehicles. That ROI is pretty freakin good! Now to be clear, none of this is guaranteed. I'm just thinking out loud and sharing it with you... a lot still depends on regulations, how fast unsupervised FSD scales, demand in each city, insurance costs, and how Tesla structures the network. But if the system works the way Elon has described it for years, owning a Robotaxi fleet could become one of the most powerful forms of passive income I've ever seen. And I plan on sharing the numbers with everyone on 𝕏 when the day comes. Personally, that’s why I’m paying such close attention. Bc one day, owning a fleet of autonomous Teslas working for me 24/7 might be the modern version of owning a rental property, except instead of tenants, you’ve got robots driving people around all day while you sleep. This next book of Tesla is going to be so exciting!

@rohitdotmittal So true about the multiples in these deals, it is all about what someone is willing to pay and if they have to outbid another party, without two interested buyers, multiples are irrelevant, it's about how little they can pay

I got on a call with a $1M ARR company founder last year who told me how he's stuck with his company even though it's not working. He’d spent five years building a B2B software product. Customers loved it. He received Thank You emails from customers. It worked, and it made money. He has a small team, him and one engineer overseas, covering salaries with a little left over. But he’d given up on the company two years before we talked. Not because the product failed or the money ran out. He was exhausted. Running the company, doing consulting gigs on the side, managing everything from product to support to sales by himself. He hated it. But he couldn’t leave for a different opportunity. He was an immigrant on a visa tied to his company. So even after he mentally checked out, he had to keep showing up. For two years, he ran a company he didn’t want to run anymore, because the alternative was leaving the country. When he finally got his green card, he felt free. That’s what he said about leaving the company he built. And look, this wasn’t a founder who’d lost faith in his product. He told me straight up he thought the right salesperson could double or triple the revenue in a year. But the fire was gone. He was the kind of done where you still do good work every day, but something inside has gone quiet, and you both know it. He’d been shopping the company around for two years. Talked to people in his network. Nothing landed. Then a larger company in his space reached out — they wanted to build what he’d already built. Build vs. buy, and they were leaning toward buy. He wanted to understand: “How much is it worth?” I told him what I tell every founder in that position. It depends almost entirely on how badly the buyer needs you at this specific moment. I’ve seen companies at his scale go for high multiples, some go for less than 1x multiple. Similar revenue, but totally different leverage. That’s what nobody tells you about small acquisitions. There’s no clean multiple. No spreadsheet that spits out your number. The price has more to do with the buyer’s urgency than your ARR. That applies only to strategic buyers, not financial buyers. ChatGPT and Claude will throw you off in a big way here. Their training data doesn't have the nuances of these details. We went through the options. Sell to the strategic buyer. Keep it as a side business and go get a job. Each path had its own math - how much cash versus equity, how long you’re locked in afterward. He was clear that he wanted to stop splitting himself across three projects and just work on one thing again. He told me he hadn’t had a weekend where he wasn’t thinking about at least two of them in over a year. Sometimes, the biggest is the one that helps you get your time back. A space to freely explore your next thing. Anyway. I bring this up because I think a lot of founders are in this exact spot and don’t talk about it. You built something that works. It’s not a rocketship, and you’re tired. And you feel weird about being tired because the thing is still generating revenue. Five years is a long time in a startup's and a founder's life. If you want to work on something else, you should make that decision.

@rohitdotmittal This isa great summary of the reality of most venture backed startups that didn't achieve what they promised they would when raising money and now can't make the hard decisions to recap or sell for a realistic valuation. I deal with the everyday at thunder.vc

I talk to stuck founders every week, and I've found a few underlying patterns when they say, "I feel stuck": Being stuck sounds like just one thing, but it's five different things that sound the same on the surface. 5 types of stuck: 1. Cap table stuck: Equity ownership after a couple of rounds is low. The company does $1.5M ARR, even a $10M exit nets you maybe $500K after preferences eat everything first. You spent 3-5 years of 70 hour weeks to make less than your VP eng's salary. The opportunity cost doesn't work, but nobody says it out loud. 2. Identity stuck You are still a founder, and you have a network of founder friends. Your poker game nights and hangouts with other founders are stimulating. You have a great network. You can't imagine walking away because walking away means leaving this behind, and you don't know who you are anymore, so you keep going. Starting a new chapter makes you feel like you'll trade this high status founder life for a low status job. 3. Market stuck You picked a good market, shipped fast, executed well, and grew revenue in the early days. But the market moved. Budgets moved to new verticals compared to 2022, and VC interest followed. Revenue growth slowed, and so did investor interest. No amount of hustle fixes a timing problem. 4. Option stuck You want out, but there are no options. You share the story in conversations that you shared 6 months ago. The next growth chapter is "just ahead." When you discuss a sale, brokers say you are too small. Strategics are not interested. VCs ghost you, but won't approve a sale because a write-off is embarrassing. So you pick the default and increase runway while pretending everything's fine. 5. Honesty stuck This is the worst one. You know it's over. You have tried multiple options, but can't find the next path for your company. Your team sees it, and they know it's over. Your investors probably know it's over (if it's not a rocketship, it doesn't matter). But nobody will say it because founders are afraid to be honest with investors. You are running on denial, while others are growing, and your opportunity cost is increasing. All founders took a shot at greatness and tried to build a big company. But it doesn't always work out. They all deserve a path to move to their next big thing. Right now, these founders are stuck in the wrong cap table with misaligned incentives. No secondary market for sub-$5M companies, no structured way for a founder to say "this works as a business but not as a venture outcome." The venture ecosystem created this and has no mechanism to unwind it. Clean and fast exits are the best way.

The issue becomes, who trains the next wave of employees and managers and leaders? I'm all in on AI but as a small business, I only hire seasoned experts and the rest of the work is being done with AI with experienced human in the loop who knows what great work looks like. For the next Gen of talent, I'm not hiring or even considering hiring them at this stage. Purely for efficiency reasons. Experts + AI crushes entry level employees.

Running a company is just context engineering internally. Now that skill has even more value in the agentic world. Us tech founders have been doing reps to prepare for this.

Having done a few of these transactions @UseThunder I can tell you that if you don't already have strategic relationships using it at least aware of your product, add 6 months to whatever you thought the timeline was. If you have several strategic relationships existing, then yes, maybe 4-6 month timeline to close. But add 6 months of you don't

been talking to a bunch of founders in the $500K-$3M ARR range about strategic acquisitions it's the same story with most vc-backed startups. raised a few million. built real product. got customers paying. but stuck between "not venture scale" and "too complicated to just walk away" here's what i tell them step 1: get honest about what you actually want not the version that sounds good to your investors. what you actually want do you want to build this for another decade or do you want to land the plane if the answer is exit, commit to it. stop the series A dance. every decision from that point should maximize the acquisition outcome step 2: understand the type of buyer financial buyers (traditional PE, business brokers) look at your revenue and apply a multiple based on financials. it's a simple spreadsheet calculation for them. strategic buyers have motivations in addition to or in spite of the financials, they are also interested in: - customer overlap - new business line - complementary products ive seen the same $1M ARR company worth $2M to a financial buyer and $20M to the right strategic the difference is how much value can a buyer generate step 3: map strategics as your golden buyers companies with complementary products or partners are the sweet spot. make market maps. find the right people at the company on linkedin. message them directly. sometimes bankers help, but mostly they don't bankers dont work at sub-$5M ARR anyway. their minimum fees dont make sense at your scale step 4: read between the lines of conversations partnership interest sounds like: - questions about APIs, SLAs, integration timelines - focus stays on product mechanics - normal business pace acquisition interest sounds like: - questions about financials, runway, team comp - "what are you thinking about next" - senior people getting pulled in unexpectedly - unusual urgency in scheduling follow ups potential buyers start asking questions beyond the partnership scope if conversations stay on partnerships after multiple meetings, thats just partnerships. no matter what they say step 5: dont let them put all risk on you common move: "lets do a strategic partnership first, maybe with warrants, then we'll talk M&A in 1-2 years" if theyre not ready to make a real bet, dont give them free options on your company step 6: keep the business running tell your team nothing until theres something real to tell keep selling. keep shipping a business thats still growing is worth more than one that stalled during a sale process step 7: accept the timeline selling takes months not weeks. even giving a company away takes time dont start when you have 2 months of runway. keep 4-6 months specifically for selling if thats the path for enterprise companies - your customers find out youre selling before you find a buyer. they leave most of the times one of the companies we recently acquired at helium was in the same situation $1M ARR but couldn't figure out the path - once the founder decided that he'd like to move on, he talked to his investors, and focused on selling the company eventually, he had a great outcome compared to him struggling with a company he wasn't excited about

@aakashgupta @devrimyasar 🫡

The entire robotics industry is about to compress a decade of progress into 18 months, and nobody’s pricing it in. The hardware has been ready for years. Boston Dynamics had Atlas doing backflips in 2018. The bottleneck was never motors or actuators. It was that every robot behavior had to be hand-coded. Pick up a box? That’s one program. Pick up a bottle? Different program. Move the box from shelf A to shelf B in a warehouse with slightly different lighting? Start over. Foundation models broke this completely. Before VLAs, teaching a robot one skill gave you exactly one skill. Zero compounding. Zero transfer. A robot trained to fold shirts couldn’t fold towels without starting from scratch. The labor intensity of data generation meant robotics datasets stayed narrow, robots overfit, and small variations like object weight or table height caused failures. Now a single Gemini Robotics model handles tasks it has never seen in training. Google’s On-Device model learns new behaviors with 50-100 demonstrations. Not 50,000. Fifty. That’s a 1000x reduction in the data requirement for new capabilities. The speed implications cascade through everything. First order: deployment timelines collapse. What took robotics teams 6-12 months of custom programming now takes days of fine-tuning. Second order: the addressable market explodes. Tasks that were never economical to automate suddenly are, because the integration cost dropped by orders of magnitude. Third order: the data flywheel accelerates. Every robot running Gemini Robotics feeds learning back into the foundation model. More deployments means faster improvement means more deployments. Physical Intelligence raised at $2.4B because investors finally understood this. Boston Dynamics partnered with Toyota Research Institute to bolt Large Behavior Models onto Atlas. Every humanoid company is scrambling to either build or license the intelligence layer they don’t have. The market is still valuing robotics companies on their hardware differentiation. But hardware is commoditizing. Boston Dynamics spent a decade perfecting locomotion, and now that’s table stakes. The value is migrating entirely to whoever owns the foundation model that generalizes across embodiments. Google trained Gemini on the largest multimodal corpus ever assembled. Then they added physical actions as an output modality. That’s not a robotics company bolting on AI. That’s an AI company whose models now output motor commands. The companies pricing this correctly are building around foundation model access, not around proprietary hardware. The companies pricing this wrong are still acting like the moat is in the mechanical engineering. AGI moving into the physical world isn’t a 10-year prediction. Gemini Robotics shipped in March. The 1.5 version with chain-of-thought reasoning shipped in September. They’re iterating on a 6-month release cycle while hardware companies iterate on 3-year cycles. The gap between software intelligence timelines and hardware development timelines is the entire trade.

@rohitdotmittal How do you communicate this to founders that resist reality? How do you break through to them that their reality distortion field isn't going to work anymore?

here's the thing about founder expectations pagerduty just hit $1.1B market cap at $500M ARR. thats 2.1x revenue for a profitable company that took 15 years to build profitable. $500M ARR. 2x meanwhile i talk to founders running $2M ARR companies that arent growing, arent profitable, and they want 10x revenue multiples. sometimes higher founders misunderstand how valuations actually work when investors pay a premium, its because theyre buying a discount on the future. the company has momentum, the market is huge, the team is executing. 10x revenue makes sense if that revenue is going to be 10x bigger in a few years but when growth stalls? when the company never lives up to that potential? theres a massive correction back to todays actual value. and todays actual value for a small stagnant unprofitable company is not 10x ARR. its nowhere close public markets are ruthless about this. pagerduty peaked at $50+ per share when the growth story was intact. now its $12. the market repriced the company based on what it actually is today, not what it might have become private markets are slower to correct but they do correct. eventually reality catches up i get it. you raised at a high valuation. you worked on this for years. you want your outcome to reflect that effort but the market doesnt pay for effort. it pays for results and potential so what should you do if youre sitting on a company thats not growing, not profitable, and youre holding out for a valuation that made sense 3 years ago when growth was real - youre probably stuck sometimes the smart move is to reset expectations. take an exit that actually closes. clear your cap table. free yourself up to go build something bigger the founders who build generational companies often do it on their second or third try. after theyve learned what they needed to learn. after theyve reset holding onto a stalled company waiting for a valuation that isnt coming back - thats not conviction. thats just being stuck

@rohitdotmittal We're seeing this every where in all markets. Thunder.vc specializes in helping founders navigate these situations. If you're a founder resonating with this post or a VC that loathes the reality of this post. DM me. I can help

you raised $8M at a $40M valuation you ground it out for 4 years and got to $2M ARR while burning money or breakeven at bast solid product. customers renew. team is competent some money still left in the bank you have revenue. you have profit. you just dont have the growth rate that returns their fund so now youre stuck your VC ghosts your emails why? because youre growing 15% not 150% cant raise because youre not growing fast enough cant sell because the pref stack means you walk with nothing cant shut down because investors wont write it off (they have you marked up in their next fundraising deck) cant keep grinding because youre burned out and own very little of your company by normal business standards you succeeded by venture standards youre a zombie and theres no infrastructure to help you exit no broker wants to touch a $2M ARR company with $8M raised no acquirer wants to deal with a messy cap table no investor wants to have the honest conversation hundreds of founders are stuck in this exact position right now we need new paths for founders to exit companies that work but dont scale

@Trace_Cohen @vercel Needs a deck upload option or link in order to have low enough friction to use IMO

Founders get instantVC feedback on your pitch! AI-powered analysis covering market opportunity, competitive landscape, risks, and strategic recommendations—just like a real VC partner. @vercel ai vibe coded!

@rohitdotmittal This is why founders that don't fit these buckets need to ask themselves, is VC right for me and what are my alternatives?

based on what i'm seeing, fundraising in 2025 comes down to two buckets bucket 1: exponential growth - vertical ai saas - ai agents and automation - roll ups and consolidation plays - ai infrastructure - b2b marketplace consolidation bucket 2: deep tech and hard problems - foundation models (voice, image, video, text) - defense and space - robotics and manufacturing - biotech and longevity - climate tech hardware - quantum and advanced materials if youre not in one of these two buckets its a brutal world out there investors are getting 10 decks every day showing 0 to 1M arr in 3 months very difficult to stand out without exponential growth or solving impossibly hard problems

@TheGeorgePu Literally had the exact same call today with another founder

I know a founder with $1M ARR who can't get VCs to return his emails. Three years ago, that would've guaranteed a Series A. Today? He's considering shutting down.

@rohitdotmittal @oliverlow_ ☝️

tracking the PEfication of VC Funds raised or deployed for AI-enabled buyouts: - General Catalyst: $1.5B creation fund - Thrive: actively rolling up (Savvy Wealth $72M) - Khosla: exploring deals - 8VC: multiple deals done - Slow Ventures: active - Bessemer: backing accounting roll-ups Portfolio companies doing buyouts: - Long Lake (GC): $670M for HOA roll-ups - Titan (GC): $74M for IT services - Dwelly (GC): UK property lettings - Accrual (GC): accounting firms - Savvy Wealth (Thrive): wealth advisors - Crete (Thrive): accounting firms sectors getting rolled up: - call centers - accounting/tax firms - property management - wealth management - IT services - homeowners associations thesis: buy at 3-4x EBITDA, inject AI, scale to 20x+ valuations VCs pushing down from growth stage into buyouts what are others that I missed?

@aliniikk @adambain Those are some epic numbers! Congrats!

I’m excited to announce micro1 has raised a $35M Series A, valuing us at $500M. This round was led by 01A with @adambain joining our board of directors. We’re grateful to be partnering with leading AI Labs & fortune 10s, such as Microsoft, to train frontier LLMs. We’re just getting started building the infrastructure layer for AGI, with the ultimate goal of answering the very fundamental question: “where should humanity spend its time?”

@Trace_Cohen Nothing in-between? I'm definitely a mix of all three

There are three types of dads at any weekend event. 🧢 The “I just rolled out of bed” dad — nothing matches, coffee in hand, pure nonchalance. Comfort is the mission. 🏃‍♂️ The sporty dad — looks like he just ran a 10K or is about to. Always ready for a pickup game. 👔 The dressed-by-his-wife dad — perfectly color-coordinated, shoes polished, looks like he’s headed to brunch at The Hamptons.

@Trace_Cohen You're selling them short. Add a zero to that number and give it at least 5 more years. Sam doesn't strike me as a public CEO

Y’all love to hate on OpenAi but in a few years when they IPO for $1T+ every banker will fight for allocation and you will buy their stock.

@MeghanKReynolds What are LPs wanting to hear when it comes to their previous PE/VSlC SaaS bets? Sell them now before it's too late? Reinvest to transform into AI? Let it ride?

Heard from VC LPs: Have been quiet on LP observations recently, mostly because my conversations feel extremely repetitive. Not much changes week to week with institutional LPs: “Need/want to invest in AI… but what about valuations?” “Concerned about all of my legacy software exposure in PE and VC- how much of this is walking dead?” “Interested in new opportunities… but I have 5-10 funds in my portfolio back to market earlier than expected” “I have ten annual meetings between now and Thanksgiving” My observation is that when LPs have overwhelming amounts of opportunity relative to time they default to essentialism - if it’s not an easy yes, it’s a no.

@RJMcGirr @jasonlk Sure, easy to blame the founders

@JasonKirby @jasonlk Founders fault for building a capital stack that requires a top 1% outcome or you get blown up

Who Will Buy The SaaS Companies? We’re sitting on a problem many don’t want to talk about: the traditional SaaS exit playbook is breaking down. Even for very, very good SaaS companies. For years, it was predictable. Build to $20M-$50M ARR, maintain decent growth, buyers would come. PE would write checks. Strategic acquirers would see tuck-ins. Not anymore. 💸 The VC Money Has Gone to AI In H1 2025, AI companies attracted 58% of global VC (64% in the US). AI funding hit a $377B annualized run rate—already exceeding 2023’s full-year total. Average AI deal size: $35.9M, double the prior year. For traditional SaaS? Mega-rounds collapsed from 147 deals in 2021 to just 21 in the 12 months through mid-2025. 🥶 PE For Traditional SaaS Has Cooled Significantly Q1 2025 saw 210 enterprise SaaS M&A deals—but total value dropped 24.8% to $29.1B. Five deals accounted for half the value. Thoma Bravo remains active but brutally selective. After 600+ acquisitions, Orlando Bravo says he’s “working the hardest I’ve ever worked in 30 years.” They’re only buying category leaders with AI integration and paths to 40%+ EBITDA. Exit multiples have reset hard. Software companies are selling at 15x EBITDA, not 25x. You need real operational improvement. 🤖 Corporate M&A Is All-In on AI Strategic buyers have one mandate: AI capabilities. AI M&A jumped 20% last year and is growing another 32% in 2025. The biggest deals? Synopsys’s $35B acquisition of Ansys, Cisco’s $28B acquisition of Splunk, HPE’s $14B acquisition of Juniper. All for AI. 🤔 The IPO Bar Is Brutally High You need $400M+ ARR growing 30-50%+ to have a shot. Klaviyo IPO’d at $600M growing 57%. Rubrik at $780M growing 47%. Public markets don’t want your $200M ARR, 35% growth company. 🔮 What Happens to the “Pretty Good” SaaS Companies? There are hundreds of solid SaaS companies at $20M-$100M ARR, growing 25-40%, with good retention. These are *good businesses*. From 2012-2023, they had clear exit paths. Now those paths are blocked. 🤷‍♀️ What Should You Do? Get profitable. Invest in AI capabilities, but they have to move the needle. Fake or performance AI copilots that don’t reignite growth don’t really help. Expect no more funding. In fact, expect no exit per se. Take any decent one that comes. And … back to the grind.

@awilkinson @oliverlow_ curious to hear your thoughts on this?

A cheeky pattern I've seen a few times: - Raise money from venture/SV style investors at high pre-money valuations to start a "holding company", often with some thesis like "we're going to add technology to an old industry" (money often raised at 30x earnings or some insane pre-money valuation) - Buy standard/low quality businesses in private equity style deals at 4-7x earnings - Send investors venture-style mark to markets based on venture-backed comps, not PE comps - Venture investors are BLOWN AWAY by the profits and revenue growth (all just via acquisition, zero organic) - Look like a genius for a while—maybe blow up once investors do the math This provides poor, or at the very least below average long-term returns to investors, but it takes 7-10 years for that to play out. In the meantime, the founder now owns 50%+ equity in a highly profitable collection of business and is set for life. Is this bad? I don't know. I want to live in a world where people can do stuff like this and authentically take swings, but it often looks like a hustle.