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RO Rory O'Driscoll 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...

“It is far better in an IPO to start low and go up than to start high and come back. Once you start coming back, everyone loses confidence and you've blown it. They put a recommended price of $70 to $78 a share, which is relatively low, and the last private round was $54 a share. So the plan, I assume, is that people pile in and they raise the range, or at the very least get it done at the high end and declare a victory.”

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch · Startups & Venture · November 2026

“It is far better in an IPO to start low and go up than to start high and come back. Once you start coming back, everyone loses confidence and you've blown it. They put a recommended price of $70 to $78 a share, which is relatively low, and the last private round was $54 a share. So the plan, I assume, is that people pile in and they raise the range, or at the very least get it done at the high end and declare a victory.” — Rory O'Driscoll, The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

Context

Jason Lemkin had said Anthropic seemed to struggle to fill its round and had to cut size and valuation. Rory pushes back and says Anthropic has priced its IPO smartly.

Transcript

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch Around 22:48 into the episode
Rory O'Driscoll

Pushing back on that, because they're not at the oversubscribed state. We're not in that stage of the process. It

Jason Lemkin

hasn't fully priced. You're right.

Rory O'Driscoll

I actually think they've played it perfectly. You know, given the dynamics of what's going on, they put a recommended price of 70 to 78 bucks a share, which is relatively low. As a reminder, the last private round was 54 bucks a share, and we'll talk about the market cap in a second. So it's up from the last private round on a per share basis, but feels modestly priced. And the whole plan, I'm sure, is to, we talked about this in a few, generate interest, and then if it's successful, walk it up. But it is far better in an IPO to start low and go up than to start high and come back. Because once you start coming back, everyone loses confidence and you've blown it. So I thought it was fairly clever. And from a kind of valuation perspective, as I say, it's literally up 20, 30% on a per share basis. The reason people are talking about 1.4 trillion versus 1 trillion is when you do a valuation on the private side, you include all the options. So the same price per share looks like a bigger pre-money. When this valuation on a public basis, they only count vested options. So that's why the newspapers say it's roughly a trillion today, but about a trillion three, a trillion four if you counted all the granted…

Harry Stebbings

Guys, what does it go out at? I know you don't like predictions, Rory.

Rory O'Driscoll

Well, not things that can't be predicted. I mean, I think it'll be very successful. I think it's a great company. Yeah. So

Harry Stebbings

you think it'll go at 1.1 and pop to 1.4?

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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