The groupthink boom: what three top VCs really think about the AI frenzy
The groupthink boom: what three top VCs really think about the AI frenzy
“从众思维”热潮：三位顶级风投如何看待 AI 狂热
This week at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event in Athens — part of the Panathenea festival taking place in the city — I sat down with Niko Bonatsos of Verdict Capital, Andreas Stavropoulos of Threshold Ventures, and Ben Blume of Atomico to ask about the current state of venture investing, the wave of mega-IPOs that SpaceX is about to kick off, and where they still see an ocean of opportunity. Our conversation, following, has been edited for length and clarity.
本周，在雅典举行的 TechCrunch “StrictlyVC” 活动（作为该市 Panathenea 节的一部分）上，我与 Verdict Capital 的 Niko Bonatsos、Threshold Ventures 的 Andreas Stavropoulos 以及 Atomico 的 Ben Blume 进行了座谈。我们探讨了当前风险投资的现状、SpaceX 即将开启的巨型 IPO 浪潮，以及他们眼中依然存在的巨大机遇。以下对话内容经过编辑，以求简洁明了。
With SpaceX reportedly eyeing a $1.75 trillion valuation at IPO, and OpenAI and Anthropic potentially not far behind, what will the impacts be on the broader market?
据报道，SpaceX 的 IPO 估值目标高达 1.75 万亿美元，而 OpenAI 和 Anthropic 也紧随其后，这将对更广泛的市场产生什么影响？
Andreas Stavropoulos: I remember how exciting the Google IPO was, and how it ushered in a reopening of a market that had been very pessimistic about tech in the early 2000s — how it was an enabling event that brought in a whole new generation of entrepreneurs. The same thing is happening now. With every subsequent wave of paradigm shifts, the scale changes by orders of magnitude, and that’s to be expected. What business today in the information age is not a technology business?
Andreas Stavropoulos：我记得谷歌 IPO 时是多么令人兴奋，它开启了一个市场，扭转了 21 世纪初对科技行业极度悲观的情绪——这是一个标志性事件，带来了一整代新的创业者。现在正在发生同样的事情。随着每一次范式转移浪潮的到来，规模都在呈数量级增长，这是意料之中的。在当今的信息时代，还有哪家企业不是科技企业呢？
Ben Blume: These are phenomenal companies, and with each one of these scale liquidity events, they generate wealth and returns that go back into the next generation of companies.
Ben Blume：这些都是非凡的公司，每一次这种规模的流动性事件，都会产生财富和回报，并回流到下一代公司中。
Niko Bonatsos: My co-founder at Verdict was the first-ever investor in what is now known as Cursor. So if Elon feels like he’s [having] a good moment, maybe Cursor [which Musk revealed recently that he has the option to acquire for $60 billion] will have some good news too. But more broadly, for the next next generation of companies, as Andreas mentioned, they could be going after much larger markets, and immigrant founders, as we know, they’re the ones who dream really big, they have nothing to lose, and they can go the distance, and Elon Musk is an immigrant founder himself. So, for those of us who come from Greece or other smaller markets, wow, you know, that’s a great example.
Niko Bonatsos：我在 Verdict 的联合创始人是如今被称为 Cursor 的公司的首位投资者。所以，如果埃隆（马斯克）感觉自己正处于“高光时刻”，也许 Cursor（马斯克最近透露他有权以 600 亿美元收购该公司）也会有好消息。但更广泛地说，对于下一代公司，正如 Andreas 所言，它们可能会瞄准更大的市场。我们知道，移民创业者往往敢于做大梦，他们一无所有，无所畏惧，能够坚持到底，而埃隆·马斯克本人就是一位移民创业者。所以，对于我们这些来自希腊或其他较小市场的人来说，哇，这真是一个伟大的榜样。
Some have suggested SpaceX at that valuation could soak up so much public market capital that it hurts companies going out in its wake. Is that a real concern?
有人认为，SpaceX 以如此高的估值上市，可能会吸走过多的公开市场资本，从而伤害随后上市的公司。这是一个现实的担忧吗？
Stavropoulos: You can choose to see most things as optimistic or pessimistic and make very good arguments for both. Something like a SpaceX, macro-wise, is going to end up bringing more people into the market than the short-term impact of soaking up some liquidity. Consumer involvement in markets in the last 30 years has gone from something that wasn’t really a thing to something people trade on their phones every day. Those numbers add up.
Stavropoulos：你可以选择以乐观或悲观的角度看待大多数事物，并且都能找到充分的理由。从宏观角度看，像 SpaceX 这样的公司，最终吸引进入市场的人数将超过其短期内吸走流动性所带来的负面影响。过去 30 年里，消费者对市场的参与度从几乎为零，变成了人们每天在手机上进行交易的常态。这些数字积少成多。
Blume: SpaceX is such a one-of-one company. For a long time, space has been a government and public sector domain. To give investors real financial access to it — I think that’s going to capture a widespread imagination. It may mentally draw from longer-tail allocations that might otherwise have gone into the next 20 or 30 software businesses, but I think the interest it generates more than compensates.
Blume：SpaceX 是一家独一无二的公司。长期以来，太空一直是政府和公共部门的领域。让投资者能够真正参与其中——我认为这将激发广泛的想象力。它可能会在心理上分流原本可能投向未来 20 到 30 家软件企业的资金，但我认为它所激发的兴趣足以弥补这一点。
Is the current flood of capital into AI justified by future earnings, or is this a case of extreme FOMO?
当前涌入 AI 领域的资本浪潮是否由未来收益支撑，还是仅仅因为极度的 FOMO（错失恐惧症）？
Bonatsos: If you’re an AI-native founder or a company in the American dynamism space right now, you can live life in the fast lane. If you’re not in one of those two buckets, it’s really tough. In 17 years in Silicon Valley, I’ve never seen more groupthink. Three quarters of all venture capital raised over the last year went into five companies. Today, if you’re a 40-year-old tenured professor at Stanford not building something in AI, no one wants to meet you. That said, something real is changing. Two founders with today’s AI tools can make more progress in two months with one round of funding than they could a year ago with ten people, two rounds, and a full year of work. This is changing how companies get started and how they’ll capitalize themselves — potentially going straight from pre-seed to Series B.
Bonatsos：如果你现在是一位 AI 原生创业者，或者处于“美国活力”（American dynamism）领域的公司，你就能走上快车道。如果你不属于这两类，日子会非常难过。在硅谷待了 17 年，我从未见过如此严重的“从众思维”。去年筹集的所有风险投资中，有四分之三流向了五家公司。今天，如果你是一位 40 岁的斯坦福终身教授，但没有在做 AI 相关的东西，没人想见你。话虽如此，确实有些东西正在发生改变。两位创始人利用今天的 AI 工具，在获得一轮融资的情况下，两个月内取得的进展，可能比一年前十个人、两轮融资、整整一年的工作还要多。这正在改变公司起步和融资的方式——它们可能直接从种子前轮（pre-seed）跳到 B 轮。
Stavropoulos: There will be a correction that pushes some capital back out of the market. The promise and the optimism is still significantly ahead of the short- to medium-term ability to show results. But on a long-term, macro scale, I don’t think we’re being over-optimistic. The problem is that shouldn’t be mistaken for thinking every 19-year-old with an idea is the next big thing.
Stavropoulos：市场会出现回调，将部分资本挤出。目前的承诺和乐观情绪仍然远远领先于短期到中期的实际成果。但从长期的宏观角度来看，我不认为我们过于乐观了。问题在于，这不应被误解为每个有想法的 19 岁年轻人都能成为下一个大人物。
How do you actually price deals when things are moving this fast?
当事物发展如此之快时，你们实际上是如何为交易定价的？
Blume: The best founders have no shortage of capital options. You have to think about what’s a meaningful ownership stake for your fund, and walk away when you can’t get there. The interesting dynamic is that we’re a $500 million fund looking at the same opportunities as people investing from a $10 or $15 billion fund. The incremental value of a dollar to us versus them is very different. That distorts round sizes and makes it difficult for offers to stack up like-for-like.
Blume：最优秀的创业者从不缺乏资本选择。你必须考虑对你的基金而言，什么样的股权比例是有意义的，如果达不到，就果断放弃。有趣的动态是，我们作为一个 5 亿美元规模的基金，正在与那些管理 100 亿或 150 亿美元基金的人竞争同样的机会。对于我们和他们来说，每一美元的边际价值是完全不同的。这扭曲了融资规模，使得不同报价之间很难进行同类比较。
Bonatsos: We do first-money investing — basically instead of friends and family, instead of angels. We invest in what I’d call “freaks” — individuals where, like in professional sports, a few people break all the records. One day goes by and they learn and mature and make the progress that takes the average smart founder a whole week. Most of the founders we’ve backed so far are working on markets that don’t have a name yet — which is exactly why the valuations are low. Larger asset managers can’t tell their teams to go find companies in a market that doesn’t exist yet.
Bonatsos：我们做的是“第一笔钱”投资——基本上是替代了亲友和天使投资人。我们投资于我称之为“怪才”的人——就像在职业体育中，少数人打破了所有纪录。他们一天内学到的东西、成熟的速度以及取得的进展，普通聪明的创业者需要一周才能完成。我们迄今为止支持的大多数创始人都在从事尚未被命名的市场——这正是估值较低的原因。大型资产管理公司无法要求他们的团队去寻找一个尚不存在的市场中的公司。
There’s a lot of talk about very young founders getting term sheets almost on arrival. Is age really a proxy for anything meaningful right now?
现在有很多关于非常年轻的创业者几乎一入场就能拿到投资意向书（term sheets）的讨论。年龄在当下真的是衡量任何有意义事物的指标吗？
Stavropoulos: At times of disruption, when the world seems to be changing in some fundamental way, it especially favors lack of experience. Experience can actually steer you the wrong way. That doesn’t mean it’s changed forever — we’re going through a phase where things haven’t settled down yet, and that creates fertile ground for new ideas, and typically younger entrepreneurs.
Stavropoulos：在颠覆时期，当世界似乎在根本上发生变化时，缺乏经验反而是一种优势。经验有时会把你带向错误的方向。这并不意味着一切永远改变了——我们正处于一个事物尚未定型的阶段，这为新想法提供了肥沃的土壤，而这通常是年轻创业者的天下。