The Unsophisticated Investor

Anthropic and one of the greatest venture returns in history

Anthropic has filed to go public at close to a trillion dollars. For the investors who got in early, the listing will unlock one of the largest fortunes in venture history. This edition is about how that fortune was built, why almost none of it was reachable by the public, and why the investor who buys at the listing inherits a different and far less forgiving set of arithmetic.

Money's switchboard: why VCs are pouring money into payment orchestration

What Primer's $100M Series C says about the dozen-strong race to control payment routing.

The revolutions rewriting medicine, and the European companies building them

A panel at the Irish Embassy, the slow death of the blood-brain barrier, and a tour through the European biotechs taking on medicine's hardest problems.

The battle for AI in professional services

OpenAI, Anthropic, Harvey, Legora and a wave of vertical specialists are now openly fighting for the same prize: the multi-trillion-dollar spend that flows through legal, banking, accounting and consulting every year. Here is who is doing what, and where the trade is going.

The speculation shift from crypto to prediction markets

The same week Coinbase laid off seven hundred people, a Warsaw startup raised two million dollars to build AI agents for prediction markets. The migration from crypto to prediction markets is underway.

Y Combinator’s wishlist vs the Entrepreneurs First talent pool

What Y Combinator's latest Request for Startups says about where capital is moving, what previous lists have actually delivered, and why Europe’s answer to YC through Entrepreneurs First may have the more durable model.

Ignore the Chatbot Wars, AI is getting more physical than most think

The model wars between OpenAI and Anthropic are dominating the headlines, but the direction of capital and underlying innovation is telling a different story about where AI is being deployed.

Drop #5 Fintech ate banking. Now its alumni are eating fintech

The most valuable thing Stripe, Revolut and PayPal produced wasn’t a product. It was a generation of founders who know exactly what broken looks like.

Drop #5 now live, and it's rebuilding financial infrastructure for European startups

Neobanks solved consumer banking. The latest drop is solving what they left behind.

Finding moats in the AI age

The ocean has a SpaceX problem

The case for putting AI into space