#217 VC Top Insights, Unpacked
& What It Means for 2025+
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VC Top Takes of The Week (& What It Means for 2025)
The Venture Capital Apocalypse (Ruben Dominguez Ibar):
“The last few years have been a rollercoaster for venture capital. If 2020-2021 was the gold rush, then 2024 is the great reckoning. A flood of capital, sky-high valuations, and a now-frozen exit market have left the industry in crisis mode. In just two years, more unicorns were created than in the entire previous decade. But the problem wasn’t just the quantity—it was the quality. The number of truly transformational startups didn’t increase. Capital just kept flowing, artificially inflating valuations and expectations.”
Interest Rate Insights (Chamath Palihapitiya):
The Federal Reserve maintains direct control over short-term interest rates through the Federal Funds Rate, but the Federal Reserve’s influence on long-term rates [lower mortgages, credit card debt, other loans] depends on market confidence in its ability to control inflation. When markets lose confidence in the Federal Reserve's inflation-fighting credibility, they demand higher long-term yields regardless of monetary policy. This is why President Trump and Scott Bessent are focusing their attention on the long end of the yield curve. Their strategy involves implementing fiscal and regulatory reforms to convince markets that long-term inflation will be contained, allowing long-term interest rates to fall without requiring Federal Reserve intervention. This approach faces a balancing act: the reforms must be substantial enough to shift market sentiment and lower borrowing costs, but not so aggressive that they trigger a pullback in consumer spending, which accounts for 70% of U.S. GDP.
$100M ARR pls. (Molly O’Shea): Elon's OpenAI bid, Anduril, Deel…
Rumors around Anduril’s $2.5B round, Deel’s mega $300M secondary, StackAdapt’s $235M round for programmatic advertising, XOi’s $230M for field service tech, and X-energy’s $200M for modular nuclear reactors.
Ben Lang on X: Tiny teams are the future:
Cursor: 0 to $100M ARR in 21 months w/ 20 people
Bolt: 0 to $20M ARR in 2 months w/ 15 people
Lovable: 0 to $10M ARR in 2 months w/ 15 people
Mercor: 0 to $50M ARR in 2 years w/ 30 people
ElevenLabs: 0 to $100M ARR in 2 years w/ 50 people
Seeding Creators at Slow Ventures (Dan Primack)
Slow Ventures has been making seed-stage investments in creators three years ago, allocating around 10% of its flagship funds. Now it's raised more than $60 million for a dedicated creators fund that appears to be the first of its kind.
"In the early 2000s you had all these kids building apps, and professional VCs said, 'That's cute,'" says Slow Ventures partner Sam Lessin. "When we go to VCs now about creators, they say the same thing. Which means they're going to miss out again."
How it works: The fund will focus on creators who've become authorities on niche areas, such as automotive or gardening, rather than on celebrities or athletes.
It will invest for a 10% stake in a holding company, and has a right of first refusal to invest in spinout businesses (e.g., restaurants, merchandising, shows, etc.).
The holdco receives the creator's ad, sponsorship, etc. revenue for 20 to 30 years, plus all founder equity in any spinouts.
The pitch for creators is that they can get investible capital to expand their businesses, in a way they can't necessarily do via social media revenue alone.
Limited partners include MIT and the University of Michigan.
Zoom in: Slow scours YouTube for potential investments, believing it's the only serious platform for monetization. If a creator's focus is on TikTok or Instagram, it might work for them but likely becomes a filter for Slow.
"We need to know that they're actually entrepreneurs, people with the sort of DNA who'd be going into Y Combinator if they weren't doing this," explains Slow's Megan Lightcap.
"There's so much more data than we're used to on other sorts of seed investments," she adds. "These people have a public presence and you can actually see how they're engaged with their communities, and we can do Bain-style analysis on their verticals."
The bottom line: The creator economy will be venture capitalized.
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