Venture Capital

🤖 Anthropic’s Shadow Power: Who Is Kemi Clark? The WSJ reveals Kemi Clark as a behind-the-scenes influencer at Anthropic, negotiating with investors and shaping decisions without a formal role. Little is known about Clark. Even Google and Claude can’t clarify her position. Information about her appears deliberately erased. About a decade ago, she sought investment from convicted Jeffrey Epstein for her startup and met Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who later invested early in Anthropic. She reportedly introduced Schmidt to Dario Amodei. Clark tried to start an internal fund called Mother of AGI Fund at Anthropic, but it never launched. The article comes as the company nears its IPO. ✔️ @venture

💰 Trump is selling faster access to his market-moving posts for up to $100K a month ㅤ Trump Media's Truth API gives paying customers access to machine-readable Truth Social posts within milliseconds. Contracts reportedly cost $60,000 to $100,000 per month, and more than 10 customers have already signed up. ㅤ The customers reportedly include financial news outlets and high-frequency trading firms. The appeal is obvious: Trump regularly uses Truth Social for announcements on tariffs and government policy that can move markets. ㅤ Now The Intercept and Freedom of the Press Foundation are suing, arguing that the service gives paying subscribers preferential access to public government information while Trump remains the largest shareholder of Trump Media. ㅤ When milliseconds can matter to a trading algorithm, early access to a presidential post becomes a product worth $100K a month. ✔️ @venture

🚀 SpaceX could create the next PayPal Mafia ㅤ SpaceX's IPO raised $75B and turned an estimated 4,400 current and former employees into millionaires. For comparison, Google and Facebook each created around 1,000 employee millionaires when they went public. ㅤ That money is already spilling back into startups. At least 147 companies have been founded by former SpaceX employees, and thousands more now have the capital to start companies or write angel checks. ㅤ There is a familiar precedent. Elon Musk launched SpaceX after PayPal sold to eBay for $1.5B. The group that emerged from PayPal later built companies including LinkedIn and Palantir, while also creating Founders Fund. ㅤ SpaceX generated $18.7B in 2025 revenue, up 305% in 3 years. Its IPO may end up doing more than creating liquidity for shareholders. It could seed a new generation of founders and early-stage investors across Silicon Valley. ✔️ @venture

Time vs Money ✔️ @venture

📈 11 stocks with some of the biggest upside ㅤ Even after huge runs across AI and tech, several major stocks still trade well below consensus price targets. Nvidia, for example, has around 35% implied upside after quarterly revenue surged from $3B to $82B. ㅤ The biggest gaps: ㅤ 🖱 Wingstop $WING: +85% 🖱 SpaceX $SPCX: +67% 🖱 Micron $MU: +62% 🖱 FICO $FICO: +44% 🖱 Reddit $RDDT: +41% 🖱 Nvidia $NVDA: +35% 🖱 Uber $UBER: +33% 🖱 Meta $META: +29% 🖱 Netflix $NFLX: +28% 🖱 Robinhood $HOOD: +27% 🖱 AMD $AMD: +25% ㅤ Some of the fundamentals behind those targets are just as extreme. Micron's gross margin has gone from -33% in 2023 to 85%, Uber has swung from burning nearly $5B in free cash flow to generating more than $10B, while Reddit's FCF margin has improved from -20% to 37%. ㅤ Price targets aren't predictions, but this is a useful watchlist of stocks where current prices still sit far below analyst expectations. ✔️ @venture

S&P 500 is up more than 90% ever since Michael Burry told investors to “Sell.” ✔️ @venture

📱 A $27 Instagram post turned into an 8-figure startup ㅤ Kale started with a simple idea: instead of paying major influencers huge fees, brands could pay everyday users for posting about products they already use. The first proof was just $27 paid for an Instagram post about dog bandanas. ㅤ Five years later, Kale has crossed 8 figures in annual revenue, grown roughly 9,000% in 3 years, and adds a new user every 90 seconds. Its clients include Unilever, P&G, Nordstrom and DoorDash. ㅤ Creators choose brand challenges inside the app and earn from a few dollars to several hundred per post depending on engagement. Kale says this content generates 20x the engagement of traditional influencer posts. ㅤ Kale's bet is that the next layer of influencer marketing belongs to thousands of small creators who look more like customers than celebrities. ✔️ @venture

✔️ @venture

🇺🇸 The U.S. is borrowing money to pay interest on its debt Interest on federal debt is expected to cost $1.039 trillion in 2026, or roughly $2.85 billion every day. That's around 14% of the federal budget and more than annual defense spending. The national debt has now crossed $40 trillion, while older debt is being refinanced at much higher rates. The 30-year Treasury yield recently hit 5.27%, its highest level since 2007. Interest payments already equal more than half of the federal deficit. The government finances that deficit with more borrowing, while higher rates make each refinancing cycle increasingly expensive. And this doesn't stay in Washington. Higher Treasury yields feed directly into the cost of mortgages, business loans, and consumer credit across the economy. ✔️ @venture

☁️ AI could more than double the cloud market by 2028 The global cloud market is projected to grow from around $432B in 2026 to $890B by 2028, as AI training and inference create a much larger pool of infrastructure demand. Expected 2028 market share: 🖱 Amazon AWS: ~33% 🖱 Google Cloud: ~28% 🖱 Microsoft Azure: ~27% 🖱 Oracle OCI: ~11% AWS remains the leader, but the bigger opportunity is moving beyond basic compute. Services like Amazon Bedrock let customers route workloads across 100+ AI models, allowing AWS to earn from the infrastructure regardless of which model wins. The AI model race gets the attention. The hyperscalers can make money from almost everyone competing in it. ✔️ @venture

💰Berkshire ends a 14-quarter selling streak with a $10B Alphabet bet Berkshire Hathaway became a net buyer of stocks for the first time in 14 quarters, purchasing roughly $23.5B in Q2 while selling only about $3.7B. Its cash pile fell from a record $397.4B to $365.5B. The standout purchase was $10B of Alphabet, personally initiated by Warren Buffett. Berkshire bought the shares directly from Alphabet at a roughly 1% discount to the simultaneous public offering, saving around $100M versus what public investors paid. Berkshire also spent $4.53B buying back its own shares, then continued repurchases after the quarter ended. Alphabet is now among Berkshire's 5 largest stock holdings. After years of building cash, Berkshire is finally deploying some of it, with Buffett putting one of his biggest new bets on Google. ✔️ @venture

“Read 500 pages every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.” - Warren Buffett ✔️ @venture

🇯🇵 Japan's biggest insurers are sitting on $91B in bond losses Japan's 4 largest insurers now hold ¥14.5 trillion ($91B) in unrealized bond losses. In March 2024, that figure was below ¥2 trillion, and it has increased every quarter since. The problem is rising Japanese government bond yields. As yields climb, existing bonds lose value, leaving institutions that accumulated huge portfolios during the low-rate era with mounting paper losses. These losses only become realized if the bonds are sold, but they complicate the Bank of Japan's path. Faster rate hikes would push yields higher and put even more pressure on the value of bonds already sitting across the financial system. Japan needs higher rates to support the yen, but raising them too quickly creates another problem at home. ✔️ @venture

Stanley Druckenmiller: “I like putting all my eggs in one basket and watching that basket very carefully.” ✔️ @venture

On this day in 2018: Elon Musk considered taking Tesla private. It would’ve valued Tesla at $71 billion. Today, Tesla is worth $1 trillion. ✔️ @venture

📣 Leopold Aschenbrenner is changing strategy after a 67% collapse Just days after Situational Awareness lost 67% of its value, the fund announced a new $400 million investment in a private company. It had already invested $100 million in the same business last month. The fund reportedly fell from $45 billion to around $10 billion after margin trading losses and the Citadel transaction. The shift is notable. Instead of doubling down on leveraged public stocks, Aschenbrenner is moving capital into private companies, where positions cannot be margin called. After July's collapse, avoiding forced selling may have become just as important as finding the next winner. ✔️ @venture

💴 Traders are betting against the yen at near-record levels Bearish bets on the Japanese yen have climbed to the second-highest level on record, even after Japan and the U.S. reportedly spent $88 billion trying to support the currency. Combined net short positions have reached 205,000 contracts, while USD/JPY has already rebounded from 155 after the intervention to around 158.5. The market's message is clear: intervention can slow the move, but it can't fix the underlying problem. As long as the interest rate gap between the U.S. and Japan remains wide, traders continue betting on a weaker yen. The last time positioning became this one-sided, the unwind triggered sharp moves across global markets. ✔️ @venture

Microsoft reportedly generated $24B in sales from OpenAI during the fiscal year ended June representing ~70% of its AI revenue. That concentration shows how much of Microsoft’s current AI monetization still depends on a single customer. ✔️ @venture