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This Thursday on 20VC w/SaaStr @HarryStebbings @rodriscoll + me is in the can: 1⃣Citi says there's no floor for software stocks ServiceNow — Rule of 56, best-in-class — is down 45% YTD. Wix bought back 30% of its shares at $92 and the stock still cratered 23%. Salesforce is taking on debt through 2066 to fund a $50B buyback. When your biggest move is financial engineering, not product innovation, the market sees it. 2⃣Thoma Bravo just shut down growth equity The largest software PE firm on the planet — $183B AUM — looked at minority stakes in software and said: we can't make money here anymore. Same week, Blackstone refused to extend another lifeline to Thoma Bravo's Medallia. $6.4B acquisition in 2021, $3B in debt, ~$200M in earnings, potential $5B writedown. The 2021 software playbook is dead. 3⃣Meanwhile Anthropic employees refused to sell at $350B Vested holdings went from $500K to $4-5M in a year and they held. When employees won't take life-changing money off the table, they see something on the roadmap you don't. That's the most bullish insider signal I've seen in a decade of venture investing. 4⃣The Mythos story isn't just about safety Andreessen made a strong point: Anthropic may not have enough compute to ship it even if they wanted to. Both things can be true. The Trainium angle is the real story: frontier model trained entirely on Amazon's custom silicon. Nvidia at 90% share is a ceiling, not a floor. 5⃣AppLovin: $4B+ revenue, 898 employees, $4.5M per head That's the benchmark now. Every B2B company running at $300K-$500K/employee has to explain the gap. 6⃣SpaceX wants to IPO at 100x revenue No company in history has sustained that multiple at scale. Saudi Aramco IPO'd at 5x and it was the most profitable company on Earth. SpaceX is posting a $5B loss because Musk stuffed xAI ($28M/day burn rate) and Twitter into the entity before filing. Much more on Thursday!!

jasonlk ↗