shaunabe

@shaunmmaguire Folks have to learn become space analysts. Rule number one - No EXPLODING.

Interesting 🤔

@pavelprata 9 likely gets more pronounced if there is indeed a rotation to include more investments linked to making or using hardware.

Monthly VC/LP debrief. What I actually saw in May 2026: 1/ SF is in full gold rush mode again, but history says the current winners won't stay on top forever. Every dominant technology eventually gets surpassed – newspapers, telecom, cable, Google in ads, IBM in computers. In AI the same pattern is already playing out: compute will hit walls, chips get dramatically more efficient, new energy sources emerge, and entirely new model architectures appear. The people feeling left behind today may just be early in a much longer cycle. (h/t @TurnerNovak) 2/ The largest $10B+ funds went from 140–150 collective early-stage deals per year in the SaaS era to 370–400 in the AI era. But the concentration is at the top of the market – top-decile rounds, known founders, proven operators. @kevinhartz calls it "option value": a small check today for the right to lead Series A tomorrow. The average seed round remains territory for EMs. 3/ We might be entering a Zombie VC era. ~85% of 2017–2018 vintage funds still haven't returned 1x DPI after 7–8 years. Median DPI sits at $0.34 on the dollar, while median IRR for the same cohort looks respectable at 11.6%. Paper returns hide the reality. The liquidity window opening over the next two years will be the moment of truth for most of these funds. 4/ @SpaceX IPO might be the single largest DPI event in VC history dropping into the lowest-distribution moment in venture capital history. @foundersfund alone, with an early $20M check in 2008, could return $60B+ (~3000x). When that capital hits LP accounts, it needs to be redeployed and that will circulate a new wave of fundraising for the same funds and fresh allocations from LPs who finally have liquidity to work with. 5/ The @cerebras IPO was the first real data point on crossover returns after two years of everyone writing off the model – both early-stage VCs and late-stage crossover funds made money on the same company, and LP conversations shifted from "do we have any exposure to the winners" to "how do we get into the next one." The same strategy that was declared dead in 2022-2023 got fully rehabilitated by a single exit. (h/t @MeghanKReynolds) 6/ Monte Carlo across 1,391 VC funds: concentrated portfolios (15 companies) and diversified ones (100 companies) produce the same average fund return – 2.44x. But compounded across multiple vintages, diversified wins: 2.25x vs. 1.78x. Concentrated funds carry more variance per fund, and variance drag compounds against you over time. The extreme outcomes (15x+) are almost exclusive to concentrated funds but the probability is tiny either way. (h/t Steve Kim) 7/ EM activity is showing the first real pulse in years. @cartainc logged 78 new US venture funds in the $10M–$100M range in Q1 2026 – a 34% jump from Q1 2025. Still well below the 2022 peak of 147, but the post-winter bottom might finally be in. The managers raising right now are doing it without a favorable macro, without easy LP recycling, and into a market where mega-funds are more active at seed than ever. (h/t @PeterJ_Walker) 8/ 76% of all EM-focused FoFs are American. The entire addressable market for a Fund I or Fund II isn't 132 FoFs – it's roughly 33. The other 100 exist, but Classic and Government-Led FoFs structurally can't anchor an early-stage vehicle: the check size doesn't justify the overhead, and a pension board can't be sold on a first-time manager without a track record. Geography and fund type filter out 75% of the market before the first meeting. (via @murphcapital) 9/ The 10-year fund is structurally mismatched with the assets mega-funds are holding. @SpaceX has been private for 18 years. @stripe for 15. For managers at that scale, @sequoia's move makes sense – open-ended, permanent capital, indefinite horizon. For small funds the logic runs the opposite way: the 10-year horizon enforced as a hard constraint, secondaries at Series C/D as the default exit, actual distributions on schedule. (h/t @credistick) 10/ There are only 3 positions that matter in a startup's cap table story: first investor, most helpful investor, biggest investor. Biggest is reserved for ~10 megafunds. First requires conviction most managers don't have – and LP preferences for concentrated portfolios often push against it structurally. So 90%+ of firms end up competing for "most helpful," which is why every pitch deck has a platform slide and every GP talks about their right to win oversubscribed rounds. (h/t @arian_ghashghai) Every month I track new fund launches, LP events, market reports, and what's actually moving in VC/LP. All of it in the @murphcapital newsletter: murphcapital.substack.com/p/edition-13-2…

@ShanuMathew93 @bcherny @trq212 Need to rename dangerously skip option to "ask forgiveness"

Find claude --permission-mode auto to still ask for permissions quite a bit. Should I move back to --dangerously-skip-permissions? Is there a way to save perferences in auto mode? It's the same access usually across sessions @bcherny @trq212

@erenbali Amen

The biggest danger to American society is this hopeless victimhood mindset. This disease is already the reason most other countries can’t get ahead. It all starts with claiming agency. Teaching young people to automatically resent successful people instead of learning from them is a society-level suicide.

Elon Musk purchasing 𝕏 is undoubtedly the greatest decision made in the last 3 years.

@Saul_Sadka Longevity specialist

He must be a very good doctor

Other driver here is shift in startups to working on things in the physical world for which VC is necessary but very insufficient. Venture debt is well named but also limited, when you can and should borrow against revenue, offtakes, assets, projects, etc. Tech startups is a place for private credit to thrive, but there is a lot to learn still.

The people who believe that private credit is a fading asset class have absolutely no idea how debt markets actually work Let’s compare direct lending vs the broadly syndicated market, which is the most common alternative that Sponsors think of when looking to finance a business > Syndicated market does not have appetite for deals below $350-400 million. If you are a middle market or lower middle market business, your only option is private credit > Syndicated markets cannot really support delayed draw term loans, PIK capability, and other structured items in credit docs > Anything with complex transaction structures like carve-outs tend to struggle in syndicated markets > A lot of borrowers don’t want to have public instruments or securities where they have to share information with the broader market > A lot of LPs prefer to have exposure to an asset class that lacks volatility. This is purely a mark to market issue, but the point remains My view is that private credit is here to stay for a very long time and will remain as a core strategy pillar for many of the alternative managers. If you disagree, would love to know why

Described to some of my VC peers how we're the college team playing in the premiership of capital providers. We simply don't understand enough about how asset, project and infra underwriters work. Early investors can barely survive some twists and turns with later stage VCs. Much easier to get wiped out with non-dilutive players.

@Ryanrz @zebulgar Happening. Fear of AI eating Software is real. But is it greater than fear of Hardware eating Software VCs? Unclear.

@Ryanrz @zebulgar

The best part about this rotation from software into industrialization Is that venture capital dollars and companies will finally be transforming the physical world The 2010s deployed billions of dollars, but if you stepped out on the street, the world looked the exact same...

“An enemy will agree, but a friend will argue” — Russian Proverb

@BoringBiz_ @signulll Storytelling with numbers, where more and more stories are sci-fi. And then some marriage counseling. Pretty fun.

@signulll Yes

do any finance ppl actually find their work enjoyable?! is there a creative process in the field?

@km Wonder if Apple is best set up to watch multiple smaller players try and then buy the winner? If we're shifting to routing between models, they're in a great position to simply observe.

Apple Intelligence has been a zero for me. Is the galaxy brain take still that their owned silicon + no capex spend will win in the end?

@azeem @adam_tooze dig deeper and you should run into a moat...or not.

@adam_tooze dig deeper

"bubble concentrations" of the US stock market in the spring of this year, shown by Michael Harnett at the Bank of America. More featured on today's Chartbook Top Links in the comment below.

@yrechtman @ItsRobbAllen Why assume ownership? He was probably leasing or financing.

@ItsRobbAllen He’s racist again droids

Dude literally carried R2D2 around with him everywhere he went during the Clone wars and has the audacity to say this to him.

@MPrinParr I think I just saw a demo for a slop cannon. Seriously though it's interesting to see a dedicated device that is focused on agents vs all of the other things we come to expect from the device formerly known as a phone.

accelerando

@garrytan Metasearch and the search toolbar round II.

Model routing is an important thing Controversial idea: the frontier labs will want their AI harness to be the moat, but ultimately the best case for consumers is that model capabilities flatten and commodify Preview of the AI Harness Wars of 2027

This is a good example of how most media is failing. It should have been possible to do the basic research required to understand this and then offer some comparison versus say farming or even home irrigation to give sense a scale of usage. It's really not hard stuff. But it suggests that most media is just content playing the opinion game for clicks.

@Chris_arnade Dont tease. Is this real?

I’m at the McDonald’s worldwide convention, where I found out about the only thing that matters - the new breakdown proof ice cream machine

And here I had been crediting Steve Jobs with simplifying to any color shirt as long as it's black.