Rory O'Driscoll
A managing partner at Scale Venture Partners, where he has invested since the firm's founding in enterprise software and SaaS companies including Box, DocuSign...
“80% of the revenue comes from models that are less than six months old… In this case, you invent something, you get most of the revenue from it in six, 12 months, and then you have to continue to invent masses of money to build the next one… This is a game where you have to spend like billions and billions and billions of dollars just to play.”
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch · Startups & Venture · October 2026
Context
O'Driscoll picks out the most striking figure in Anthropic's S-1. He reads the six-month shelf life of a frontier model both ways: frightening if you miss a generation, but a moat for a leader willing to write $10 billion compute checks.
Transcript
…know what the fund was, right? Yeah. And their greatest investment and their largest checks, right? So to see that all happen now after 100 years, that's the end of, that's the whole story, right? I mean, greatest investment, biggest check, fastest time to liquidity. Why are we doing anything else?
Rory, you said about questions there. There are always cynics in the audience. There are always people throwing peanuts. If you were to present the alternate view of, oh, here was a striking number or two. Is there any that.
…not for inference. In other words, once you've built, the models are wildly expensive to build. Once you build them, they're fairly widely profitable to serve. And you want to get to serve them for six months and then you got to invent another one. It's this kind of, it's so not like software where you're on this kind of, you know, you build something and maybe you can sell it for 10, 15 years. In this case, you invent something, you get most of the revenue from it in six, 12 months, and then you have to continue to invent masses of money to build the next one. And, you know, then your question is, so what do you make of that? You know, because the funny thing is, that's the facts. And you could look at it one way and say, oh, my God, that's totally scary. If you miss even once, you're screwed. And on the other hand, you can say to yourself, that might actually be great for Anthropic because they're best in the position to build new stuff and they…
Elon's point that most of these neolabs are just going to die after this, right? They just can't, it's not possible to raise the capital to survive, right? I thought there was one bad metric that wasn't in the S1. I thought the worst metric wasn't in the S1.
Go for it.
The worst metric was that Broadcom had to bail out this debt issue so that Anthropic could buy its chips. That the market was saying it doesn't get much, it doesn't get any better than Anthropic. We just read the S1, right? It doesn't get any better, but they weren't able to get this debt for this…
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