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...
“If the demand for AI is as strong as people think, then everyone's going to need every damn computer, GPU, and data center they want, and those CoreWeave bonds will be money good, because someone will buy the damn company. If the demand is not there, the first person who suffers is not going to be Google or Amazon, who have a big balance sheet. It's going to be guys like CoreWeave.”
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch · Startups & Venture · November 2026
Context
Asked whether OpenAI's smaller, discounted round meant the AI wave was cracking, O'Driscoll calls it price discovery on the supply side and says whether it matters depends entirely on whether demand holds up.
Transcript
Jason told me last week that it was the most underappreciated. I
…kind of took me to task on this last week, but Broadcom having to guarantee Anthropic's debt is a little wobbly. It's just wobbly. And IPOs are always thin and wobbly. Like they, no matter how many times we say they get oversubscribed, 20X, so many of them are just a little wobbly going into it.
Again, I didn't take the task. I think all those things are true. I think it is. The way I think of it, there's a lot of kind of pushing, shoving. There's a lot of price discovery, risk discovery going on on the supply side of the AI trade. What price do you need to be paid to lend money to Core Weave? What price do you need to pay to buy open AI in the private markets when you get in the public markets, right? I agree. All that stuff is going on. And I think when you go from assumed euphoria regardless to tempered euphoria, there's this kind of price discovery process on the way. And I think, so I think it's fair, Jason, those things are all true. As I say, my point is merely if the other side of the equation, the demand side, holds up, all these things will be, you know, forgotten in six months. And if there's a problem on the demand side, on the growth side, then all these things will be straws in the wind of a very significant change. That's my point. So when you zoom out to what matters, if the demand for AI is anything like some of the bulls would say, then let's talk about the Core Weave bonds because everyone's like, oh my God, the bonds are going to go. If…
You mentioned price discovery. It was a tough week for Alphabet or Google falling about 12%, most significant drop in a decade. Google Cloud doubled to an insane number. It doubled to like 130 billion, growing 103%. But search did slow to 12%. Free cash flow was negative. Unusual when looking at…
Again, it's on the search side. It's been true for two or three years that there's probably going to be some element of cannibalization of search. And, you know, it still grew pretty nicely. I think it grew 12% or so on search. But I think there was a combination of search, angst, and general…
I just think we're in a, listen, I think we are understandably just in a nervous period. Yeah. I mean, I think it's at a $120 billion run rate growing to 100%, right? That's about as good as it gets for the folks in the cloud group should feel pretty proud of themselves. I just think when any…
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