Rory O'Driscoll
Rory O'Driscoll is a co-founder and General Partner at Scale Venture Partners, a venture capital firm focused on early-stage enterprise software companies. He has more than 30 years of VC experience and is best known for early investments in SaaS pioneers such as Bill.com, Box, and DocuSign, as well as for recognizing the cloud and AI transitions in enterprise software. He has appeared on the Forbes Midas List and is a prominent voice on enterprise software valuations and the shift from SaaS to AI-enabled business applications.
“I saw GXO, which is a logistics company... '42 POCs of humanoids, zero deployed.'”
Source→“if Generalist, Pi, and Skild become the dominant foundation models for robotics, then it is equivalent to my foundation model comment.”
Source→“They were competitive early on with Open Weight, then they kind of faded back way to the back of the pack, and now they're up front again, notably with closed-source models. So we've decided that if we're going to spend $100 billion, we'll at least be able to charge for the damn thing.”
Source→“here the value capture is not replace labor. It's actually make science discoveries... when you create the $200 billion drug, you want to get 10% of that on a royalty basis.”
Source→“all the people, even the megafunds who are coming in saying, 'You guys should waive your rights,' ain't fixing to waive theirs”
Source→“the gap revenue growth from Q1 to Q2 was 18% quarter and quarter... massive deceleration at a time when Anthropic was still going 10x”
Source→“you guys were smart enough to do OpenTable 26 years ago now... it's a billion-dollar business today.”
Source→“when you guys said after 30 years, you're going to embrace growth, I thought you tiptoe in... It's 10 billion pre pre revenue, big ass check.”
Source→“Chime, which I admire as a company, trades well, but not amazingly.”
Source→“Revolut, which is sticking it to all the crappy old school banks in Europe, is making out like a bandit.”
Source→“you guys are in Higgsfield. You run into a bunch of these guys who are like, well, we took $10 million, but we shipped the product for $3 million”
Source→“it would be pretty criminal if we had the biggest boom in AI history and Fei-Fei Li didn't get a big ass check.”
Source→“there will be a bunch of these big-ass acquisitions over the next 6, 12 months if the market continues to hold”
Source→“Participants: Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll”
Source→“growing 20%. They were growing 30%. They're growing at 20% now... I want Canva to win very badly”
Source→“I think the Supreme Court is going to take the case and overturn it narrowly... This is an eighth amendment issue. You can't find somebody $12 billion”
Source→“this was just a risk factor in an S1 done live... he's just getting ahead of a risk factor so that when the two trillion dollar IPO happens, it's a non issue”
Source→“Automatic would have been a great company if it hadn't raised venture capital... those guys aren't venture backable”
Source→“The holding period of venture is longer than the technology platform chain cycle. So if you join halfway through, right, this is coming at you... 20 years ago, this would long since have been public. It would be trading as common stock and it would just get hoovered up... A lot of these late stage rounds, long since would have been public in another world.”
Source→“What's dominated my Twitter over the last week is Greg Eisenberg's original tweet about a horror story of venture fundraisers. It led to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of founders sharing horror stories.”
Source→“He's kind of short-circuited the price discovery process, and instead, we're not doing price discovery, I'm telling you the answer, and the only question is how much of it do you want to buy at that price.”
Source→“Did Elon have the acquisition of the year buying Cursor for what will be 10 times end of year revenue? Looks a pretty prescient buy if they're going to hit target.”
Source→“Ramp raising their latest round at $44 billion... Tripled in a year, cross a billion in ARR, positive free cash flow.”
Source→“They're doing what? Four and a half billion in revenue, you know, 1.5 billion in operating income, which is freaking amazing.”
Source→“Databricks raised a new private round at $165B (up from $134B), explicitly choosing to stay private.”
Source→“In January 1st, you could have said, look at all those data centers and you don't have a foundation model. You're screwed. Here we are June 9th and he can say, I have a 24 billion dollar outsource business.”
Source→“consumers don't want to work. There's not a big market for consumers in their non-working life to do a whole bunch of complex research or kind of using AI for productivity. They just want delightful experiences because they want to relax and attain.”
Source→“That's also why Nubank is such a valuable business. Because the Brazilian banks are inefficient. There's a reason why Chime is worth 5 billion... because the US banks are now a little more efficient.”
Source→“You've got, I think it's Recursive and Poolside, a couple of Reflection and Poolside doing that.”
Source→“Salesforce has $300,000 of revenue per head, which means if they're going to make money, they can't pay anyone more than 200,000. And they're probably spending 1% of revenue per head on tokens... Contrast that with your example of Replit. They're getting 2.3 million per head, but they're probably spending 70% of dollars on tokens.”
Source→“He said, well, kind of finding product market fit is just a continuous mission of luck in some ways. And then the execution machine built after that requires no luck at all.”
Source→“You're probably looking at across those three, four names, including Google, $300 to $400 billion of equity issuance, all of which is really AI related... grabbing big piles of cash while they can.”
Source→“If you're not willing to outsource it to Harvey or Ligora, who at least are focused solely on your [vertical] — I don't see large law saying, 'I'm totally fine with doing this on Claude.'”
Source→“If you really think it's giving away your secret K&E sauce or your Cooley sauce or your Gunderson sauce, do you really want to let Harvey train on that?”
Source→“Kirkland and Ellis have already won because they said it first. So they got all the publicity and the clients are aware of it. They look great. They look AI forward and they didn't even do something.”
Source→“We actually made an investment in a company Range that does this for kind of the low end of the high-net-worth.”
Source→“Superbase is the Postgres database. It's just brilliantly co-attached to everything. It's grown quickly too.”
Source→“Participants: Harry Stebbings (Host), Jason Lemkin (SaaStr founder/investor), Rory O'Driscoll (Scale Venture Partners)”
Source→“If private credit, which is the senior lender to a whole bunch of PE-based deals is struggling... they were at 5x EBITDA leverage, they're worried. Then the PE guys who are from five to 10, in other words, the equity is below the debt in the stack. If the debt's in trouble, the equity is dead.”
Source→“The trend here is exponentially increasing costs as you move from simple chat interaction all the way to full-on agents. So even though the cost per token stories are yay, amazing, going down, the actual cost to do something goes up a lot.”
Source→“If you're on this exponential curve that Dario and Sam keep talking about, then the knowledge to be frontier keeps growing every year. And it's just super hard to keep up.”
Source→“The OpenRouter one is interesting because going back to what Jason says, if people are spending $300 million on a premium product and having to lay off people as a result of that, there's going to be some interest in exploring cheaper costs.”
Source→“Jensen Wang said this week, on AI CapEx infrastructure spend that we'd reach $3 to $4 trillion by 2030.”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.