Cerebras completes IPO at $185 per share

HSHarry Stebbings@HarryStebbings

WTF is going on? Anthropic and Elon. Cerebras IPO. Ramp at $40BN. I sat down with @jasonlk & @rodriscoll to discuss the deal, along with the biggest news in tech this week: - Anthropic Buys Compute From Elon & Commits $200BN to Google - Cerebras IPO: The Breakdown - Ramp's $40BN Latest Valuation - Hubspot Tanks, Monday Rockets: WTF is Happening in Public Markets? My notes below: 1. Foundation Made the Investment of the Decade with Cerebras Jason argues that Foundation’s success with Cerebras is a masterclass in “actual venture capital” because they did not just muscle into a hot round. They incubated the company in 2016, when the category did not even make sense. By playing the long game, finding a brilliant founder, seeding the idea, and holding roughly 9% ownership through a $40B+ IPO, they proved that the biggest returns still come from doing the hard work before a deal becomes obvious. 2. What Founders Have to Understand Is That to Win, You Have to Mentally Be Changed Forever There is a fundamental breakpoint around the four-to-five-year mark when a founder’s brain is permanently rewired by the intensity of the journey. Jason notes that winning at a high level requires a commitment to becoming a different person. The happy-go-lucky version of yourself from the early days is gone, replaced by someone who can often only relate to other founders who have survived similar maelstroms. 3. The Enemy of My Enemy Infrastructure Play Anthropic’s partnership to use SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data center highlights a massive consolidation where the strongest players are hoovering up all available capacity on the planet. For Elon Musk, this move transitions xAI from a buyer of CapEx to a net seller of capacity, turning a potential money pit into a $3 to $5 billion annual revenue stream because Grok is not currently growing at the same pace as leading-edge models. 4. The Crackdown on Shadow Cap Tables Anthropic is enforcing board approval for all secondary sales to reclaim cap table control and call out "bad actors". Rory warns that side contracts for "economic rights" are legally fragile; because the company has no obligation to honor unapproved transfers, many investors face "messy" losses at the IPO. 5. Model vs. Application: The Vertical SaaS Death Zone The industry is debating if horizontal models will consume the application layer or if vertical workflows will remain independent. Jason predicts a "terminal state of decay" for legacy marketing tools because agents have no need for manual templates. Once a model can perform an application’s core function directly within a prompt, that software becomes obsolete. 6. Token Maxing vs. The 100x Engineer Despite massive growth forecasts, a "micro backlash" is growing against "token trash" generated by mediocre developers. Jason predicts a clampdown on wasteful agentic spend, where companies prioritize unlimited resources for elite "100x engineers" while restricting "web heads" who burn compute for minimal productivity gains. (links below)