Turner Novak 🍌🧢(@TurnerNovak):I asked @MayfieldFund Managing Partner Navin Chaddha what actually happens when a new startup raise a $1B+ round? "It's clear these companies have their sights on $1 trillion outcomes. To get to the scale of Anthropic or OpenAI, that's the initial money you need. The revenue per employee is the highest ever. But they're essentially industrial companies. They have to spend money on GPU's. They need to train. They need to spend money on the cloud providers. That's the majority of it. And this is typically done in a series of rounds. You raise a little money. Then you raise 5x more. Then 10x more. And it gets announced at once. But just because a few model and chip companies need that capital, it doesn't mean everyone needs that much. Out of the 5,000 new companies formed per year, maybe 10 or 20 deserve those big rounds."

2026.08.08 13:16

I asked @MayfieldFund Managing Partner Navin Chaddha what actually happens when a new startup raise a $1B+ round? "It's clear these companies have their sights on $1 trillion outcomes. To get to the scale of Anthropic or OpenAI, that's the initial money you need. The revenue per employee is the highest ever. But they're essentially industrial companies. They have to spend money on GPU's. They need to train. They need to spend money on the cloud providers. That's the majority of it. And this is typically done in a series of rounds. You raise a little money. Then you raise 5x more. Then 10x more. And it gets announced at once. But just because a few model and chip companies need that capital, it doesn't mean everyone needs that much. Out of the 5,000 new companies formed per year, maybe 10 or 20 deserve those big rounds."

Turner Novak 🍌🧢@TurnerNovak

2026.08.07 17:22

New @ThePeelPod with Navin Chaddha Navin's an 18x Midas Lister who runs Mayfield, a 56-year old firm betting $3B on AI. We get into what’s actually going on with $1B+ inception rounds, the math behind the $6T AI software market, why AI is 10x overcapitalized today, what he learned working with Satya Nadella in the 90's, and lessons from founding the last company to IPO before the Dot Com Crash. Full episode here + links below 0:00 Lumilens: Zero to $3B revenue in 14 months 0:50 Connecting GPU's is AI's next bottleneck 5:07 Investing $3B in AI and semiconductors 9:39 Where a $1B round actually gets spent 12:51 The six-layer AI stack 15:00 Why AI is overcapitalized by 10x 17:47 FOMO is for sheep 21:13 Real revenue vs vibe revenue 22:45 Backing vertical models 24:22 The best firms have one North Star 27:18 Are semiconductors still cyclical? 29:10 Why inference will dwarf training 31:19 What happens after every infra build-out 36:27 Real vs fake AI adoption 38:21 What a correction does to AI stocks 40:46 How FOMO pulls VC's into hot categories 44:13 What Navin looks for in founders 50:23 Everyone hating a category can be a buy signal 54:12 The cloud argument everyone got wrong 57:20 The $6T of white-collar work AI will take 1:01:45 How AI startups beat incumbents 1:06:54 Startups die of indigestion 1:11:49 Mayfield’s investing formula: people-first 1:19:18 What cricket taught Navin about building companies 1:23:17 Dropping out of Stanford to start VXtreme 1:29:22 Lessons from the last IPO before the Dot Com Crash 1:31:25 Joining Mayfield instead of starting a 4th company 1:33:29 Unfinished business (backing a $1T company) 1:35:54 Could you tell Satya would run Microsoft? 1:38:58 Investors he respects, founders he missed

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