Dan Primack
Author of the Axios Pro Rata newsletter covering venture capital and deals.
“This OpenAI/FT stuff is the sort of thing that would be eliminated if both it and Anthropic go public.”
Source→“Yesterday I spoke on the phone with Vinod Khosla, the legendary venture capitalist, entrepreneur and newly minted NFL owner.”
“We are 1.4% off the S&P all-time high. The Shiller PE is at an all-time high.”
Source→“Staying private can be worse than going public. The conventional wisdom is that raising privately avoids public scrutiny. Primack argues that private financing carries hidden costs and that an IPO has strategic benefits beyond cash.”
“Podcast: Axios Pro Rata, Participants: Dan Primack”
“Dan Primack frames the stakes plainly: "When everyone is in charge, no one really is. And that makes it much tougher for companies to plan future deals."”
“The STB could approve both the access requests and the merger, hoping that Trump isn't digging too deep into the weeds (i.e., merger approval = good). But if Union Pacific complains to the administration, let alone follows through on its threat to bail, then there could be blowback.”
Source→“Curing disease is one of AI's most tantalizing use cases, fetching billions of VC dollars, but thus far it's generated more excitement than evidence.”
Source→“Participants: Dan Primack”
“Participants: Dan Primack”
“The U.S. economy added 162k jobs in August, more than tripling expectations, with backward revisions adding another 55k jobs.”
“AI founders, however, often seem more interested in sipping from the glass until they're sated.”
Source→“Yet the Democratic Party hasn't yet articulated its vision for artificial intelligence, a technology that promises to fundamentally transform our economy and society. It's a failure of leadership, and also exacerbates investor uncertainty.”
“The promise to limited partners has been cash-on-cash returns — it's about the 'access,' not the 'picking' — after years of diminished distributions.”
“This is a giant step, but still feels like an interim one that maybe wouldn't have happened if not for the Paramount/WBD and Charter/Cox deals.”
“Dan Primack interviewed Palihapitiya on "The Axios Show"; he put the fear in personal terms worried about his 15-year-old daughter's generation”
Source→“The discourse reflects a deep shift in the startup ecosystem over the past couple decades — the move to 'founder friendly' investing, even potentially at the expense of fiduciary duty to limited partners.”
“"President Trump is moving closer to Bernie-nomics with each passing day, which is probably a surprise to both of them."”
“This reflects the growing interconnectivity of tech and geopolitics, particularly as sectors like defense-tech become key to venture portfolios. Plus the growing influence of sovereign wealth funds, both as limited partners and co-investors.”
“Participants: Dan Primack”
“A salary floor may actually help raise team values by making more teams competitive and more games meaningful, but apparently that's a secondary concern for many owners.”
“Groq 2.0 is raising $650M.”
“Don't be surprised if this becomes a new transaction template in the AI private markets.”
“Groq is one of the biggest AI wins so far for venture capitalists, and those same investors now get a second bite at the apple... as Groq transitions from being an AI chipmaker into an AI inference neocloud business.”
“Got to wonder if we're beginning to transition from a B2C-dominated economy to a B2B-dominated economy. Stocks (and GDP) can soar while actual people struggle to make ends meet. The circular nature of enterprise AI spend is corroding the correlation between Main Street and Wall Street.”
“Cerebras' success, plus Fervo Energy and BX Digital Infrastructure, may help spark the IPO wave that we've been waiting on for years.”
“It's hard to claim that keeping JetBlue and Spirit apart has preserved low-cost competition when Spirit planes are now parked like yellow school buses at midnight.”
“F1 seems to wrestle with whether it wants to remain an exclusive, luxury brand or become something for the masses.”
Source→“My conversation with Peter Chernin — Dan Primack”
“"Tech investors regularly say that they back people, not projects. Individuals, not ideas. That means the unprecedented quantums of capital are being bet as much on Altman and Musk as they are on OpenAI and SpaceX — even if neither man is an actual AI engineer. What happens over the next few weeks, therefore, could make or break fortunes."”
Source→“"Ineffable Intelligence, a London-based reinforcement learning startup, raised $1.1b in 'seed funding' at a $5.1b valuation." The use of quotation marks around 'seed funding' in the newsletter itself signals editorial skepticism — this is a market-structure anomaly worth watching as a potential bubble indicator.”
Source→“The key to taking a private investment firm public is to diversify the business, preferably with less volatile assets than venture capital or private equity.”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.