Hadrien Comte

final boss

2026 has been a generational year for us at Menlo already. — Anthropic is the fastest growing company of all time adding $4.5B run rate in 42 days after the $380B round. We put ~$1B into it starting from the Series C — Suno reaches 100M users and $300M ARR — Lovable is the 5th most adopted and 2nd fastest growing AI vendor, going 0 to $200M in a yr — OpenRouter grew 2.5x in 1.5 months. On track to 1 quadrillion token annual run rate. — Higgsfield hits $200M run rate with creative tools and a $1B+ valuation. — Wispr Flow continues to grow 40% MoM with a 70% 1 year retention and wins some massive enterprise contracts — Clerk becomes #4 fastest growing vendor in the league of Google, Atlassian and Replit — Inception launches the first and best reasoning diffusion model that is the fastest for its intelligence at 1000tokens/s — Goodfire, Anthropic's first direct investment, hits $1B+ val and discovers novel biomarkers for Alzheimer's Most VCs don't believe in this model of being picky, low volume investors. We do very few investments (up to 2/partner/yr) and we go early. 5 of these were partnerships since the Seed. It's been working for us so far (even though we've missed a lot too!) It's an privilege to work with founders who run through walls and take on so much risk to bring new things into the world. And we're very lucky to play a small part in that! Still a lot of work to do.

@bryan_johnson Owner of farm to table Sicilian EVOO shop here (remedy to EVOO slop): maps.app.goo.gl/VUexJYaM9tR6Bf… Owner of bean to bar chocolate manufacturer sourcing from elite cocoa farms: maps.app.goo.gl/MeWqryjW1gfion…

I'm traveling to Paris...who should I meet?

If you had to read one thing about "SaaS is dead": software is not dead, it’s just recalibrating the DCF and therefore the NPV. Stable retention rate will be the true litmus test.

AGI is now on the horizon and it will deeply transform many things, including the economy. I'm currently looking to hire a Senior Economist, reporting directly to me, to lead a small team investigating post-AGI economics. Job spec and application here: job-boards.greenhouse.io/deepmind/jobs/…

POV you’re about to be pitched the world’s first quadruple-layered Anthropic SPV

Man the sentiment on software as an investment here is pretty bombed out. Some various thoughts from having spent a couple decades working in software: - This was the easiest market for a long time. Greenfield opportunity everywhere - A few sub-problems flow from this. A) That didn’t exactly nurture what I would describe as “operational rigor.” B) I also wouldn’t describe many of these executive teams as killers C) People are used to operating in an inbound environment with weak competition. Very much not the case today - Similarly, gross margins hid a bunch of lazy, bad habits - And investors have never given a shit about real profit, so that is baked into how these companies operate. - You would think 2022 would have washed a lot of these bad habits away. For some companies, like I would say Shopify is a great example, it absolutely did. For other companies it did for a little, but muscle memory is strong, and times got good again. Some didn’t even really try. So you are going from an environment with a ton of tailwinds, minimal competition, low interest rates, investors who didn’t care about profit, and high gross margins to… Incredibly intense competition, needing to sacrifice margins to compete in AI, knife fights everywhere as tailwinds vanish and operating surfaces converge, higher rate environment, investor concerns on terminal value due to AI disruption risk, and a bunch of other real, structural issues that would make this post way too long to read And almost all these companies aren’t cheap even after this de-rating. And they’re not growing that fast anymore either. And AI native app layer companies are stealing their incremental customer LTV. And the management aren’t really killers because they haven’t had to be. So do I think a lot of the bear cases are extreme? Yes. But is there a lot, a lot of truth here? Also yes.

@saranormous Jon Gray BX

If I interviewed some of the capital providers of this AI era (credit or infrastructure funds, sovereigns, masa son, family offices) who would you most be interested in hearing from?

@saarth_ Norwood reversion

Juniper returned $7b+ to Kleiner's ~$500m fund ... I think it was 2500X but often ignored. Only player doing TCP/IP for the public internet in 1996 when every telco customer wanted ATM. If Juniper had not started the internet likely wasn't going to be TCP/IP. The CTO of @Cisco told me they would never do a router above OC12! wsj.com/articles/winni…

"We have to make sure we're taking enough risk... and that usually comes in the form of evaluate the entrepreneur and the company on the magnitude of their strength [...] I think it's always a mistake to rule out somebody who's truly world class on a weakness."

@lulumeservey @PEntremont

1/ After 6 years of publishing the State of OpenCloud to capture the trends and operational frameworks from the best founders we speak to, we are making a change. Introducing the @BatteryVentures State of AI 2025 Report. It’s a reflection of how AI continues to reshape the software stack, from how applications are built and deployed to how they are priced and adopted.

DEEP DIVE: VC firms are building their own AI tools to compete for the best startup deals. And for founders, that's changing the relationships game. Here's what the AI-ification of venture capital means for startups, in my new @UpstartsMediaCo feature. upstartsmedia.com/p/deep-dive-vc…

The biggest hoax in euro tech right now is that you need to move to the US to make it. Yes the bay area is great and defo a place to learn and over time build a team there as you scale. No doubt the 50y of tech expertise and talent density need to be leveraged. No place like it on planet earth. But it has never been EASIER to build from Europe. There is no comparison to 10-20y ago where the option to stay could compromise your business Today that is not the case. The arc of time is delivering. IT IS HAPPENING. The algo on this platform, the bot farms are all playing against this narrative. Why? Because they need our talent. Go to the US, get an O1, get funded. succeed? A win for the US. Fail? More talent for US companies. Even US personalities like marc andreesen or YC folks don’t want you to believe you can build from Europe. Remember Sam Altman’s post? Jakub and Szymon. Hello CEE. How many of our killer math olympiads have we shipped to the US? Fight the hoax. Resist the anti-euro engagement farming machine. Trust the system. Build in hard mode.

@MindaugasLT @nikitaandersso3 Lovable Nairobi judging from the elite running shoes 🥇

Guess the office 👟👞🥿👡👠

Robinhood $HOOD has launched 10 new product suites in 2025 up from 7 in 2024, 4 in 2023, and 2 in 2022 - Ark Invest