AMD acquires World Labs for ~$8.2b. But who gets the 💰? My usual breakdown below 👇 From founding to an $8.2b exit in ~2.5 years. A huge value creation event. This is a fantastic exit, especially for the co-founders and the team. Investors will still share ~$2.3b of profits on $1.2b invested, a ~2.9x blended. Low-ish because most of the capital came in last. But it hides a lot of disparity between the various rounds! So let's dive in: 1) The real home run: founders and team 🏆🥳 This is one of the best founder outcomes I've modelled. @drfeifei, Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner and Ben Mildenhall started World Labs in Apr-24. Less than 2.5 years later, they and the team still own ~56% according to my estimates. At an $8.2b valuation, that's a total prize of ~$4.6b to share between them. Taking a 15% attributed option pool, that's ~$1.2b for the team and ~$3.4b for the four co-founders. If split equally, that's ~$850m each, in just two and a half years. 💸 And, at close, Fei-Fei Li joins AMD as EVP and Chief Scientist, reporting to Lisa Su! Legendary. 2) The buyer was already on the cap table (again) 🔁 AMD Ventures invested in the Series B and the Series C here. Now they are buying the whole company. It's the same playbook as Nvidia with Hugging Face: strategic corporates are using their venture arms as a free option on future acquisitions. 3) The standout VC winners: a16z and Radical Ventures 👑 Both backed Fei-Fei at inception, in Apr-24 at a ~$300m valuation. That Series A will return ~19x the money, or ~$1.2b of proceeds, in under 2.5 years. Congrats to @martin_casado and team. Another mega win after Cursor and OpenRouter. The team at @a16z truly is on a generational run. 4) The star angels did well 🌟 The Sep-24 Series B had arguably the strongest AI angel list ever assembled: Geoffrey Hinton, Andrej Karpathy, Jeff Dean, Eric Schmidt, Reid Hoffman, Marc Benioff, Ram Shriram and more. Priced at $1.3b, it was never going to be a 1,000x. But ~5x in two years is a ~125% IRR 📈 And the best part is: Hinton's AlexNet won the 2012 ImageNet competition, and ImageNet was the dataset Fei-Fei built. Twelve years later, he backed her company. Full circle. 🔄 5) The late money: a great IRR, but a poor multiple of money 🤏 The $1b Series C in Feb-26 at $5.4b returns ~1.5x in 7 months. That's a great IRR, but in terms of venture returns, this is a poor multiple of money. Although I am sure no one will complain about seeing DPI this quickly! Congrats to all involved!

The biggest AI launch since ChatGPT is not happening on your laptop. It is happening on WhatsApp. What it means for Meta, Booking, your insurer, and everyone who has never opened ChatGPT:

30 years later: are we living Amazon’s own Barnes & Noble moment? 1996: Len Riggio takes Bezos to dinner, tells him B&N's website will crush Amazon, then floats a partnership. Bezos passes 2026: Amazon passes on Muse. Bets its own agent owns the next interface Interesting.

Extremely smart move by @FactoryAI. On-prem / own VPCs may become a much larger part of workloads with AI, as large enterprises will care more about protecting sensitive information and controlling costs.

The most interesting thing you likely missed today: In the OpenAI feud with @cursor_ai: @mntruell, co-Founder of Cursor said OpenAI was ~5% of their traffic. A remarkably low share. And very similar to OpenAI’s weekly token share on @OpenRouter (9% MtD / 8% this week).

Nvidia acquires Hugging Face for ~$12.9bn. But who gets the 💰? My usual breakdown below 👇 *Investors are sharing ~$7.3bn of profits on <$400m invested. A cool ~20x blended.* *1) The single biggest winner here? Lux Capital.* 👑 Lux is taking the crown for the most $ returned in this transaction. The two rounds they led (Series A & Series C) generated ~$2.6bn combined. They also participated in the Series B. Congrats to @wolfejosh and team. The $15.0m Series A alone will return ~132.5x the capital invested, or ~$2.0bn. The most lucrative round in absolute $ returned. *2) Backing an exceptional team paid off with a >1,000x return for Betaworks and the angels* 📈 The story few people know: Hugging Face started life as a chatbot for lonely teenagers... You sent it a selfie and a sad emoji, it told you it understood. Quite far from where it landed! That is why backing an exceptional team in @ClementDelangue, @Thom_Wolf and @julien_c is always the right thing to do. It paid over 1,000x for Betaworks, Kevin Durant and Thibaud Elziere. *3) Founders and team are crushing it: not taking too much dilution along the way paid off* 👏 I estimate they will share ~$5bn in proceeds, assuming no secondary was taken along the way. A life changing outcome for them and many employees. Taking a 15% attributed option pool at exit, this would mean ~$2bn for the team and >$3bn to share for the three co-founders. Legendary! *4) Salesforce Ventures is cementing its reputation as one of the very best corporate VCs.* 🥇 Salesforce is adding Hugging Face to its long list of successful exits: Snowflake, Zoom, DocuSign, nCino, Auth0... Very few investors can claim as many successes, let alone corporates. The $235m round they led returned $675m in just three short years. Meanwhile, Salesforce's own stock has been flat for the period. Capital well invested! *5) This is a little bit of a heartbreak: but I wanted to congratulate @joinstationf here:* Hugging Face walked into StationF as a 4-person team on day one, June 2017. Back when it was a chatbot for teenagers. They went through multiple corporate programs (Microsoft, Ubisoft, then Naver). Unfortunately they were not investing or taking equity at the time - but they contributed to making it possible. And so for that: hats off. And of course, congratulations to all others involved: Addition, Sequoia, Coatue and many others. No one will be left out!