Anthropic’s last round was apparently a bloodbath behind the scenes. A GP at a prominent fund had dinner with Dario three times before their allocation was slashed to zero. At least four other tier-one funds got pulled at the last minute.
Their crime? Passing on the Series B, the hardest round Dario ever had to raise (led by Spark). In venture conviction is all that counts.
The world’s largest alternative asset manager, @blackstone, leverages TextQL to enhance its data and analytics capabilities.
John Stecher oversees technology at Blackstone and across its portfolio. After evaluating a wide variety of analytics tools, he chose TextQL.
In John's words, "When I walked out of the first meeting with TextQL, I thought, wow, this is a product that many of our portfolio companies could benefit from."
The world’s largest alternative asset manager, @blackstone, leverages TextQL to enhance its data and analytics capabilities.
John Stecher oversees technology at Blackstone and across its portfolio. After evaluating a wide variety of analytics tools, he chose TextQL.
In John's words, "When I walked out of the first meeting with TextQL, I thought, wow, this is a product that many of our portfolio companies could benefit from."
100%
"Should we build on Claude?" is just "should we build our own CRM on AWS?" 15 years ago but with a new logo.
The primitives don't kill the long tail to production. In-house lost on TCO years ago and the brief 2026 dream that agents would shrink the eng team has curdled into token bills bigger than the headcount ever was.
Anthropic's JV with a services firm is the tell: they don't want the last mile. AWS, not Salesforce.
Here’s our application video to @ycombinator s26: agentic body count detector
We built a 4 agent committee to analyze how many body count people think you have based on your appearance
We are pushing the frontier of AI for Biology with the aim to increase birth rate, which is a serious problem human race is facing right now
It comes with a full analysis of your body count as well as ways to increase it and therefore make sure we can have more babies in our society
Try now link in comment
Stepping outside the echo chamber is underrated. You’ll be a day late on the latest trend. But the focus you gain on what matters long-term is the real edge.
This coming from someone that thinks the quality of life in NYC is way worse than SF.
narrative violation: nyc is a much better place to lock in than sf
people you meet going out in nyc are generally not helpful for your startup, so its easier to justify staying in compared to sf
Minority take: the VCs clutching their pearls over this is just some performative founder-friendly cosplay.
There’s nothing wrong with poking fun at the fact this industry funds silly stuff sometimes.
Bad ad in general? Maybe. But here we are all talking about it.
Notes from the comments: it’s a growing business, real tech, problems solved. And they’re still shutting down and returning the money.
I could never do that to our customers. Basically saying you never believed in what you sold them and then leaving them high and dry.
Founder closed a $15m Series A (top tier VC) and 6 months later, plans to return the cash to investors. Feels like long term, Claude will displace the product / erode the value. This is really happening, most people are not talking about it, it’s kinda wild.
JetBlue hasn't made a profit in six years. Spirit is on its second bankruptcy in under 12 months. Delta made $5 billion last year. They fly the same kinds of planes to the same airports, but two of them are dying and one is having the best run of its 100-year history.
In the last three months of 2025, Delta made more money from its premium seats than from its economy seats, for the first time ever. CEO Ed Bastian told investors that more than 95% of Delta's revenue now comes from households that earn more than $100,000 a year. Almost every new seat Delta adds in 2026 will be business class or first class, barely any economy at all.
The airline market has split in two. Business travelers and wealthy vacationers will happily pay $1,200 for a seat that folds into a flat bed. Everyone else picks whichever ticket is $9 cheaper on Google Flights. The middle of the market has vanished, and JetBlue has been sitting right in the middle for years.
About 60% of JetBlue's flying happens in New York and Florida, where it has to fight the big legacy airlines on one side and the dirt-cheap budget airlines on the other. JetBlue tried to be the nice middle option. Free wifi and decent legroom, plus seatback TVs that other airlines skip. It never built the luxury cabin revenue that Delta and United rely on. Its rewards program doesn't print money like Delta's American Express deal does. JetBlue owes about $9 billion and pays $600 million a year just in interest. It has lost money in most of the last six years.
Spirit tried the exact opposite and still lost. A pure budget airline with yellow planes and tickets starting at $49. Then travelers changed their minds. They decided paying a bit more for a seat assignment and a checked bag was worth it. Spirit bolted on bigger seats and bundled fares. That only raised its costs without making Spirit feel fancy. Two bankruptcies later, the company had just $337 million in the bank at the end of last year.
The Middle East fuel spike is speeding up a collapse that was already under way. Jet fuel went from an average of $2.49 a gallon in 2025 to $4.88 on April 2 of this year. That is a 95% jump in about five weeks, after Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz shipping route at the end of February. JP Morgan estimates Spirit will lose 20 cents on every dollar if fuel stays at current levels. JetBlue will lose about $1.3 billion this year. Neither airline brings in enough rich-traveler money to cover that hole.
If both shrink or disappear, the winners are already picked. Delta, United, and American will walk away with the empty gates and the open takeoff times. Your cheap flight out of Fort Lauderdale just becomes a more expensive flight out of Fort Lauderdale.