Interplay

Venture Capital + Accelerator + Studio + Multi-Family Office

[Interplay @interplay]

Main Street is planning to hire like it's 2020. The S&P is earning like it's 2021. Both are true right now.

In May, the NFIB Small Business Optimism Index fell to 95.3, its ninth straight month below its 52-year average. Buried inside: a seasonally adjusted net 9% of small-business owners plan to add jobs in the next three months — down four points from April, and the lowest reading since May 2020.

Two months later, the top-line labor number caught up. June nonfarm payrolls came in at just 57,000 — roughly half the 115,000 consensus, with downward revisions to the prior two months on top.

Meanwhile, the other economy is having its best year in half a decade. S&P 500 companies are on pace for their strongest quarterly earnings growth since 2021, concentrated in the AI-adjacent names that drive capex and revenue simultaneously.

→ Small-business hiring plans: net 9% (lowest since 2020)
→ S&P 500 Q1 2026 earnings growth: strongest since 2021

The takeaway isn't that Main Street is broken. It's that the two economies are running on different fuel. Big-cap earnings are being pulled forward by an AI capex cycle that concentrates spending in a narrow set of buyers and sellers. Small-business hiring is being throttled by pricing pressure, labor costs, and demand uncertainty that doesn't show up in an index dominated by ten names.

Any thesis that ignores which economy a portfolio company sells into is a thesis running on the wrong data.

Full analysis → https://t.co/Rg8xSXwsrW

#SmallBusiness #NFIB #Economy #VentureCapital #AI #Interplay

[Leon Mueller @iamleonmueller]

Today we're launching Ivy, the AI operator for family offices and investment firms.

She holds the firm's memory, works like a team member, and gets things done before you ask.

See her live → https://t.co/RMK2bumYZz

[Interplay @interplay]

Robots don't usually fail because they don't work.

Poor system integration and mismatched ROI expectations cause more than half of deployment failures. Inadequate change management adds another ~20%.

The tech works. The deployment doesn't. That gap is a software problem.

@navya_prab maps where physical AI's second wave is opening up: https://t.co/GRtVicTXOY

[Interplay @interplay]

The manufacturing story on your feed says two things: factories are humming, or factories are dying. Neither is what the federal data actually shows.

Employment is up 333,000 workers since 2015. It's also down 305,000 since January 2023. Output is 2% below its 2015 baseline. It's also up 3.4% off its October 2024 bottom. Both facts, same series.

The 2015–19 productivity gap is closing right now: output per hour is up 3.9% since early 2023, on a workforce that's shrinking. And it's closing in specific segments the aggregate hides. High-tech equipment output is up 11.1% year over year. Consumer goods is down 1.2%. The average tells you nothing.

With capacity utilization 2.5 points below its long-run norm, the industrial-tech pitch that sells "more units per hour" is selling into a factory that already has room to run harder. What buyers are actually paying for right now is different.

We pulled the federal data. Full read: https://t.co/AGRo2HLhfw

[The Full Ratchet @TFR_Pod]

AI isn't killing software. It's killing companies without barriers.

In episode 514, @mpd explains why AI is expanding demand, how @interplay built an internal AI system that boosted productivity by 50%, and why venture investors need a new playbook for finding winners.

[Mark Peter Davis @mpd]

Every founder I know is asking the same question: “How should we actually implement AI across our company?”

The reality is that every playbook will require customization, but there are clear patterns beginning to emerge.

In this episode, Chetan Narain, Cofounder of Pepper, joins me and my colleague, Interplay Senior Partner @kevinwtung , to share how Pepper is integrating AI across its products and organization — and the lessons they’ve learned along the way.

We discuss:
- Where vertical SaaS ends and vertical AI begins
- AI agents and guardrails
- Organizational redesign
- How to move fast without creating chaos

If you're building a company and thinking beyond AI features toward AI transformation, I think you'll enjoy this conversation.

[Interplay @interplay]

OpenAI took the first formal step last month toward the most anticipated tech listing since the dot-com era. It sits on an $852B private mark from its March round and has signaled ambitions to price the IPO north of $1 trillion. The valuation is the "easy" part — justifying it isn't.

Set the valuation against the fundamentals and you get the defining tension of the filing:

→ Revenue is genuinely extraordinary — roughly $25B annualized as of early 2026, up from ~$20B at the end of 2025.

→ But the same business runs a 33% gross margin and is on track to burn ~$27B of cash in 2026, rising toward ~$63B in 2027. Internal forecasts pointed to a $14B loss in 2026 alone.

That gap — between fast-climbing revenue and even faster-climbing cash burn — is what needs to be justified.

A deck can frame a widening loss as investment in a category-defining platform — Amazon did exactly that. But an S-1 is a legal document. It has to reconcile an $852B mark with disclosed losses, a compute-cost structure that scales with usage, and partner economics — including Microsoft's revenue share — that most public investors will read closely for the first time.

For founders, the lesson isn't "don't burn capital." It's that the story you tell in a deck and the story an S-1 forces you to tell diverge sharply the moment losses have to be quantified in a table.

OpenAI is about to run the highest-stakes version of that exercise in public. What the market decides the unpriceable is worth will reset the comp set for every AI company behind it.

Full analysis → https://t.co/7TmVQBFEGh

#OpenAI #IPO #VentureCapital #AI #AIEconomy #TechIPO

[LeafLink @LeafLinkUS]

The LeafLink team is growing 🚀 We're building infrastructure powering the cannabis industry and hiring across Corporate Development, Engineering, GTM, Legal, and Product.

Explore open roles: https://t.co/tsKdDc97k5

#Hiring #CannabisIndustry #LeafLink

[Emerge @Emerge_Market]

One system instead of a dozen inboxes. Here's a customer on what changed:

"Our planners build their loads, step away, and come back to multiple competitive bids instead of manual back-and-forth with carriers." - Nicole Pierzina, CTP, Pitney Bowes

#LogisticsSolutions

[Rho @rhobusiness]

Half of tech thinks vertical AI is dead. @sdorosin is betting a fund it isn't.

She's quantifying 137 founder traits and thinks VCs are misreading the labor shortage entirely.

New Rho Venture Grounds out tomorrow.

[Rho @rhobusiness]

For this month's Rhound Up, we took to the streets to announce June's product updates.

Some news deserves to be shouted from the rooftops (or at least from the sidewalk).

Invoicing upgrades, new ways to manage your cards on mobile, and more.

Check out the full release in the comments.

[Lawmatics @lawmatics]

We're at the AAML National Family Law Conference in Las Vegas🎲 If you're attending, stop by to learn how Lawmatics helps family law firms automate intake, streamline client communication, and convert more leads into clients.

[Lawmatics @lawmatics]

You're paying for leads. Are you converting them? Marketing a law firm in 2026 means more than picking the right channels.

It means having intake and follow-up systems that can actually close.

We wrote the guide we wish more firms had when starting to scale.

[Rho @rhobusiness]

Rho now accepts international wire payments in the payment portal. Global clients, no friction.

Send your first invoice → https://t.co/KA4UuiroPC

[Mark Peter Davis @mpd]

Socks are the #1 most requested item at homeless shelters. Dave Heath turned that single fact into @BOMBAS . The brand has donated over 200 million items of clothing and built a billion-dollar business along the way. What makes Dave a builder worth studying isn't just the scale. It's the discipline behind it. He reverse-engineered an exceptional product from a mission. He learned to test before betting. And he protected the brand as it grew.

In this episode, I sit down with Dave to break down:
• How he reverse-engineered an "exceptional product" from a donation mission and brought athletic-sock innovation to the mass market.
• The Shark Tank effect, going from $800K to $2M in revenue in the six weeks after airing.
• The expensive lesson of expanding into adjacent products too fast and the MVP-testing discipline that replaced it.
• Radical-ish transparency.
• The self-awareness to evolve his own role as the company scaled and how he screened his successor for humility
• How Bombas is approaching AI.

Big thanks to Dave for coming on the pod and sharing the playbook (and the mindset) behind Bombas.

[Interplay @interplay]

For the first time on record, more US venture capital money came back to investors through private share sales than through IPOs. In Q1 2026, those private sales ran at an annualized $112.2 billion. IPOs ran at about $105 billion.

The instinct is to read this as another symptom of a quiet IPO market. It isn't. Private share sales have grown ~30% a year since 2022 while IPO proceeds stayed flat. PitchBook calls 2026 the year these private sales graduate from a temporary fix into a permanent piece of the market. The pool of money set aside to buy these shares hit $11.8 billion in June 2025 — nearly 3x what it was in 2022.

This is a structural change. Three things worth sitting with:

- Fund managers: Returning cash used to mean waiting for an IPO or sale. Private share sales let you do it years earlier — but every sale prints a real price, so wins and losses both arrive while the fund is still active.

- Institutional investors: The "value" line on a quarterly report used to be an estimate. Now it's a real price someone just paid. The numbers are more trustworthy — and they can also swing 30% in a quarter without the company doing anything new.

- Founders: Tender offers used to be a rare treat for the most senior people. Now they're regular events. That resets hiring expectations, founder concentration, and the question of whether you ever need to go public when $112 billion a year already moves quietly in the private market.

The IPO class coming for SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic will reset this picture. It won't undo it. The plumbing is built. The new exit — secondaries — has quietly become the exit that might just matter the most.

Read more here: https://t.co/E9s5Yhm4eA

#venturecapital #privatemarkets #ipo #liquidity

[Interplay @interplay]

America just stopped building offices for people. In April 2026, US data-center construction ran at a $50.7 billion annualized rate, passing general office construction at $43.8 billion for the first time on record.

This is the cleanest single-chart refutation of the "services-led growth" narrative we have seen. The next investment dollar is no longer funding a software-company office in Austin. It's funding a hyperscale data-center campus (the giant cloud-compute halls run by Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta) in northern Virginia, Phoenix, or central Texas — and the entire industrial supply chain underneath: electrical switchgear, transformers, liquid cooling, specialized cleanroom build-outs, concrete, copper, steel.

Two things are converging. Raw computing power is now the binding constraint on every frontier tech company. And the office category itself is shrinking in real terms after a generation of remote/hybrid work and a wave of conversions of mid-tier ("Class-B") offices into apartments. The compute curve is doubling every five years; the office curve has flatlined.

The opportunity for industrial and AI-infrastructure founders is wider than the headline. Anything that touches the data-center supply chain — grid interconnection, electrical equipment, liquid cooling, prefab construction, on-site power, fiber, security, system commissioning — sits on a multi-decade tailwind that does not depend on AI models continuing to get better. Even if the AI software layer becomes a commodity, the compute infrastructure has been built and someone has to run it.

The $50.7B number being quoted is in the spotlight, but the real insight is the crossover.

Read more here: https://t.co/lTrZuOUZAy

#industrialAI #datacenter #venturecapital #infrastructure

[Lawmatics @lawmatics]

At AILA? Stop by Booth 223 to see how immigration law firms are using Lawmatics to automate intake, engage leads faster, and turn more consultations into clients.

[Lawmatics @lawmatics]

A firm recovered 5 lost clients in 30 days. Not by getting more leads, but by finally being able to see the ones they already had. Read how Penglase & Benson fixed their intake process with Lawmatics.

https://t.co/WHhQqVssYB (https://t.co/8fFCUXnyxw)