Thomas Laffont

speaker

504 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 4 Jun

Thomas Laffont’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg · Thomas Laffont: The $4T AI IPO Wave, 2026's Unicorn Economy, and the 10X Paradox · 4 Jun 2026 podcast

So multiple years in a row now that AI is increasing its wallet share of fundraising.

But the composition of that funding has changed.

If you look at the unicorn factory, which really peaked in the Zerp era of 2021, we've now really normalized at a much lower level pre-COVID.

So mathematically, if you put both together, you can see that the funding per unicorn has increased 5x since 2021.

So we have fewer unicorns that are each raising more.

Now I'm gonna spend a minute on this slide because this slide is really about the health of our ecosystem.

So the way to interpret this is if you look at the green line, which is the pre-Zerp era unicorn cohort, of which there's about 73.

You can see that 20 quarters after becoming a unicorn, 80% of them had either raised a new round or exited, which is, I would say, pretty healthy.

Now, if we look at the 2021 cohort, which is the red line, two things stand out.

First, that 20 quarters in, you can see less than 20% less had either exited or raised.

But look at the number 479 versus 73 in the prior cohort.

So now here comes this new cohort, what we'll call our 2024 cohort of AI companies.

And the key question is, what will happen in the future?

which of these cohorts will they resemble the most?

So we talked about how AI is concentrating the funding base of unicorns, but what we also see is the top 10 is capturing a significant share of funding.

So it's not just AI companies, it's a small number of AI companies, which probably makes sense since we know that Anthropic and OpenAI are raising massive rounds.

And so what I like to think is we kind of have a new index.

If we really thought about what the index of the future is, what for now I'll be able to call the magnificent eight, but that number is going to shrink as these companies go public.

The first thing that jumps to my mind is, wow, what an incredible group of companies.

And look at the diversity, SpaceX, Stripe, Anthropic, Databricks, Revolut, ByteDance, Andoril.

Showing 21–40 of 504 · page 2 of 26