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...

“I'm going to say it every week: the AI trade doesn't crack on the supply side. It doesn't crack because the data centers can't be built. It doesn't crack because Nvidia loses market share to AMD. If the demand is there, and that demand will be evidenced in ARR for OpenAI and Anthropic, then everything else will be roughly fine.”

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

Context

Harry Stebbings asked why the Nasdaq 100 lost about $2.5 trillion in a day and whether the AI trade was cracking. Rory argues the selloff was reactive, and puts the real test of AI on demand, not supply.

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Transcript

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch Around 20:05 into the episode

Rory O'Driscoll

…So on Thursday, you pop back down. So a lot of this is fairly reactive. It's some version of, oh, my God, we can't build data centers. All these people aren't going to let's build data centers. So maybe we won't sell as much chips. But I don't know how deeply thought through it was. It was.

Harry Stebbings

So you don't see this as the AI trade cracking and it showing first signs of that.

Rory O'Driscoll

I'm going to say this again. I'm going to say it every week because the AI trade doesn't crack on the supply side. Doesn't crack. It's like, doesn't crack because the data centers can be built, can't be built. It doesn't crack because NASDAQ Loses market share to AMD. It doesn't track any of those other reasons. If the demand is there, I say this over and over. If the demand is there and that demand will be evidenced in ARR for OpenAI on a Tropic, if the demand is there, everything else will be roughly fine. There might be some companies like, you know, they get ahead of themselves like Core Weave, but it'll all be fine. So I think looking at that last Thursday and trying to extrapolate some kind of informed, oh, I've suddenly realized we're only going to sell 300 billion of tokens instead of 500 billion. Let the stock go down. I think it just grasps what it straws. I think a whole bunch of aggressive pods in Hedgeland got kind of nervous and kind of got blown up because they're over their skis. And remember, the good folk at Citadel and places like that, they basically take your checkbook away at 5% and they…

Harry Stebbings

Jason, you agree with that?

Jason Lemkin

Well, I would say two things. One, we've discussed before. I think it makes sense for the markets to be nervous about this. There's a lot of assumptions. There's a lot of capital to be deployed. There's a lot of debt required. And, you know, as we're recording this, Anthropic's getting ready and…

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

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

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