Interplay

Main Street is planning to hire like it's 2020. The S&P is earning like it's 2021. Both are true right now. In May, the NFIB Small Business Optimism Index fell to 95.3, its ninth straight month below its 52-year average. Buried inside: a seasonally adjusted net 9% of small-business owners plan to add jobs in the next three months — down four points from April, and the lowest reading since May 2020. Two months later, the top-line labor number caught up. June nonfarm payrolls came in at just 57,000 — roughly half the 115,000 consensus, with downward revisions to the prior two months on top. Meanwhile, the other economy is having its best year in half a decade. S&P 500 companies are on pace for their strongest quarterly earnings growth since 2021, concentrated in the AI-adjacent names that drive capex and revenue simultaneously. → Small-business hiring plans: net 9% (lowest since 2020) → S&P 500 Q1 2026 earnings growth: strongest since 2021 The takeaway isn't that Main Street is broken. It's that the two economies are running on different fuel. Big-cap earnings are being pulled forward by an AI capex cycle that concentrates spending in a narrow set of buyers and sellers. Small-business hiring is being throttled by pricing pressure, labor costs, and demand uncertainty that doesn't show up in an index dominated by ten names. Any thesis that ignores which economy a portfolio company sells into is a thesis running on the wrong data. Full analysis → interplay.vc/blog/two-econo… #SmallBusiness #NFIB #Economy #VentureCapital #AI #Interplay

OpenAI took the first formal step last month toward the most anticipated tech listing since the dot-com era. It sits on an $852B private mark from its March round and has signaled ambitions to price the IPO north of $1 trillion. The valuation is the "easy" part — justifying it isn't. Set the valuation against the fundamentals and you get the defining tension of the filing: → Revenue is genuinely extraordinary — roughly $25B annualized as of early 2026, up from ~$20B at the end of 2025. → But the same business runs a 33% gross margin and is on track to burn ~$27B of cash in 2026, rising toward ~$63B in 2027. Internal forecasts pointed to a $14B loss in 2026 alone. That gap — between fast-climbing revenue and even faster-climbing cash burn — is what needs to be justified. A deck can frame a widening loss as investment in a category-defining platform — Amazon did exactly that. But an S-1 is a legal document. It has to reconcile an $852B mark with disclosed losses, a compute-cost structure that scales with usage, and partner economics — including Microsoft's revenue share — that most public investors will read closely for the first time. For founders, the lesson isn't "don't burn capital." It's that the story you tell in a deck and the story an S-1 forces you to tell diverge sharply the moment losses have to be quantified in a table. OpenAI is about to run the highest-stakes version of that exercise in public. What the market decides the unpriceable is worth will reset the comp set for every AI company behind it. Full analysis → interplay.vc/blog/pricing-t… #OpenAI #IPO #VentureCapital #AI #AIEconomy #TechIPO

The LeafLink team is growing 🚀 We're building infrastructure powering the cannabis industry and hiring across Corporate Development, Engineering, GTM, Legal, and Product. Explore open roles: leaflink.com/careers/ #Hiring #CannabisIndustry #LeafLink

One system instead of a dozen inboxes. Here's a customer on what changed: "Our planners build their loads, step away, and come back to multiple competitive bids instead of manual back-and-forth with carriers." - Nicole Pierzina, CTP, Pitney Bowes #LogisticsSolutions

Half of tech thinks vertical AI is dead. @sdorosin is betting a fund it isn't. She's quantifying 137 founder traits and thinks VCs are misreading the labor shortage entirely. New Rho Venture Grounds out tomorrow.

For this month's Rhound Up, we took to the streets to announce June's product updates. Some news deserves to be shouted from the rooftops (or at least from the sidewalk). Invoicing upgrades, new ways to manage your cards on mobile, and more. Check out the full release in the comments.

We're at the AAML National Family Law Conference in Las Vegas🎲 If you're attending, stop by to learn how Lawmatics helps family law firms automate intake, streamline client communication, and convert more leads into clients.

You're paying for leads. Are you converting them? Marketing a law firm in 2026 means more than picking the right channels. It means having intake and follow-up systems that can actually close. We wrote the guide we wish more firms had when starting to scale.

Rho now accepts international wire payments in the payment portal. Global clients, no friction. Send your first invoice → signup.rho.co

Socks are the #1 most requested item at homeless shelters. Dave Heath turned that single fact into @BOMBAS . The brand has donated over 200 million items of clothing and built a billion-dollar business along the way. What makes Dave a builder worth studying isn't just the scale. It's the discipline behind it. He reverse-engineered an exceptional product from a mission. He learned to test before betting. And he protected the brand as it grew. In this episode, I sit down with Dave to break down: • How he reverse-engineered an "exceptional product" from a donation mission and brought athletic-sock innovation to the mass market. • The Shark Tank effect, going from $800K to $2M in revenue in the six weeks after airing. • The expensive lesson of expanding into adjacent products too fast and the MVP-testing discipline that replaced it. • Radical-ish transparency. • The self-awareness to evolve his own role as the company scaled and how he screened his successor for humility • How Bombas is approaching AI. Big thanks to Dave for coming on the pod and sharing the playbook (and the mindset) behind Bombas.

For the first time on record, more US venture capital money came back to investors through private share sales than through IPOs. In Q1 2026, those private sales ran at an annualized $112.2 billion. IPOs ran at about $105 billion. The instinct is to read this as another symptom of a quiet IPO market. It isn't. Private share sales have grown ~30% a year since 2022 while IPO proceeds stayed flat. PitchBook calls 2026 the year these private sales graduate from a temporary fix into a permanent piece of the market. The pool of money set aside to buy these shares hit $11.8 billion in June 2025 — nearly 3x what it was in 2022. This is a structural change. Three things worth sitting with: - Fund managers: Returning cash used to mean waiting for an IPO or sale. Private share sales let you do it years earlier — but every sale prints a real price, so wins and losses both arrive while the fund is still active. - Institutional investors: The "value" line on a quarterly report used to be an estimate. Now it's a real price someone just paid. The numbers are more trustworthy — and they can also swing 30% in a quarter without the company doing anything new. - Founders: Tender offers used to be a rare treat for the most senior people. Now they're regular events. That resets hiring expectations, founder concentration, and the question of whether you ever need to go public when $112 billion a year already moves quietly in the private market. The IPO class coming for SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic will reset this picture. It won't undo it. The plumbing is built. The new exit — secondaries — has quietly become the exit that might just matter the most. Read more here: interplay.vc/blog/the-new-e… #venturecapital #privatemarkets #ipo #liquidity

America just stopped building offices for people. In April 2026, US data-center construction ran at a $50.7 billion annualized rate, passing general office construction at $43.8 billion for the first time on record. This is the cleanest single-chart refutation of the "services-led growth" narrative we have seen. The next investment dollar is no longer funding a software-company office in Austin. It's funding a hyperscale data-center campus (the giant cloud-compute halls run by Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta) in northern Virginia, Phoenix, or central Texas — and the entire industrial supply chain underneath: electrical switchgear, transformers, liquid cooling, specialized cleanroom build-outs, concrete, copper, steel. Two things are converging. Raw computing power is now the binding constraint on every frontier tech company. And the office category itself is shrinking in real terms after a generation of remote/hybrid work and a wave of conversions of mid-tier ("Class-B") offices into apartments. The compute curve is doubling every five years; the office curve has flatlined. The opportunity for industrial and AI-infrastructure founders is wider than the headline. Anything that touches the data-center supply chain — grid interconnection, electrical equipment, liquid cooling, prefab construction, on-site power, fiber, security, system commissioning — sits on a multi-decade tailwind that does not depend on AI models continuing to get better. Even if the AI software layer becomes a commodity, the compute infrastructure has been built and someone has to run it. The $50.7B number being quoted is in the spotlight, but the real insight is the crossover. Read more here: interplay.vc/blog/america-s… #industrialAI #datacenter #venturecapital #infrastructure

At AILA? Stop by Booth 223 to see how immigration law firms are using Lawmatics to automate intake, engage leads faster, and turn more consultations into clients.

A firm recovered 5 lost clients in 30 days. Not by getting more leads, but by finally being able to see the ones they already had. Read how Penglase & Benson fixed their intake process with Lawmatics. na2.hubs.ly/H069XqC0 (na2.hubs.ly/H069Vy90)

We're headed to Reuters Supply Chain USA! 📅 June 23–24 📍 Chicago Our team will be connecting with supply chain and logistics leaders. Looking forward to great conversations! If you'll be there too, let's connect. #SCUSA #SupplyChain #Logistics #FreightProcurement

The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) reports March 2026 chip sales hit $99.5B — up 79.2% YoY. Q1 totaled $298.5B. The industry is on track for the first $1T year in semiconductor history, ~2 years ahead of the most aggressive 2024 forecasts. The number matters less than the shape of the curve. For 40 years, semis were textbook cyclical: 18–24 month up-cycles (PCs, mobile, cloud), then 12–18 month corrections. Investors learned to underwrite the cycle, not the trend. The 2024–2026 data shows the cycle didn't correct. It accelerated. March's +79% follows a +28% comp in March 2025 — this isn't a base-effect bounce. One end-market explains nearly all of it: AI infrastructure. HBM is sold out through 2027. The constraint is no longer demand — it's fab capacity, packaging, and power. For VC, the takeaway isn't about chip companies themselves. It's that the cost of running AI — training and inference — is falling faster than any prior compute shift, because the underlying chip supply is compounding at 70%+ annually. That cost decline flows downstream to every company building on top of it. In the cloud era, infrastructure costs flattened within a few years; here, they're still dropping. Anything built on this base inherits that. The first trillion-dollar year isn't the story. The story is that it no longer looks cyclical. interplay.vc/blog/the-chip-…

Every immigration firm is trying to solve something: ⚡ Faster intake 📈 Better follow-up 🤝 Stronger client communication 📊 Clearer reporting If any of those are on your list, let's talk at AILA 2026.

Rho now catches incomplete expenses before approval, so every transaction that hits your books has the data it needs.

PitchBook-NVCA's Q1'26 data confirms what every seed investor has felt for six months: the seed round is no longer a category. It's two. The headline — a $3M median — looks unremarkable. The distribution under it isn't. It's bimodal. Peak 1: the classic $2–4M seed. Capital-efficient, team-and-thesis, 18–24 months of runway. Nothing new there. Peak 2: the $20M+ mega-seed. AI-native, pedigreed founders, functionally a Series A wearing a seed label. Different game. The valley in between — the old $7–12M "priced seed" — is where the worst 2026 rounds live. Too big to be scrappy. Too small to fund the AI play. In my experience, that's where down rounds incubate. So the right question for a founder raising now isn't how big the seed should be. It's which seed market they're in. There is no longer a default answer. Full piece: interplay.vc/blog/two-seed-…

Anduril: $5B raise, $61B valuation. The same week was the largest defense-tech VC week on record. Silicon Valley is re-enlisting — and it's worth remembering the Valley was born defense (Fairchild → Minuteman, Apollo → ~60% of all ICs, DARPA → ARPANET). Then it drifted. Cold War wound down in '91, the web arrived in '93, and by the late 2000s the dominant Valley archetype — Google, Facebook, Twitter — had near-zero federal exposure. The near-divorce hardened in 2018, when 3,000+ Googlers signed the letter that killed Project Maven. The reversal came quietly: Palantir (In-Q-Tel → 2020 IPO → $300B+), Anduril (founded 2017 to rebuild a prime the Valley way), SpaceX (the Pentagon's biggest launch provider). Today's Stanford/MIT grads compete for the offers that were career suicide in 2018. What changed? A hot geopolitical backdrop, DoD on-ramps (Replicator, OTAs) that fit startup timelines, and a founder generation that decided ceding the frontier was the bigger ethical risk. The $5B isn't the story. The story is there's no longer a contradiction. Full piece: interplay.vc/blog/silicon-v…