The biggest IPO in history is getting close. A 30-year-old video game studio just got switched off. And the protests I wrote about yesterday are still going. Here’s what our archive says about all three.
The biggest IPO in history is getting close
Anthropic is expected to publicly file for its IPO any day now. Reports said it could come as early as Friday 23 October, and a Nasdaq listing is reportedly targeted for as soon as mid-November. Its draft prospectus reportedly shows $16.3 billion of revenue in the first half of this year, and Wall Street is talking about a raise of up to $100 billion at a valuation somewhere between $1.5 and $2 trillion. Meanwhile SpaceX, now a public company, jumped nearly 8% on Wednesday.
In 2013 I sat down with Simon Cook, who ran the European arm of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the firm that backed both Tesla and SpaceX early. As he put it: “What kind of crazy people invest in people who want to build rockets?”
▶ Watch Simon Cook on backing Elon from 11:41
Then he told me something that matters more today than it did then. His firm had been in Tesla for nearly a decade, through every venture round, and held the stock right through the IPO. At the time Tesla was worth around $12 billion. Look at it now.
But here’s the part most people skip. Simon didn’t make one lucky bet. “We invest in dozens,” he said, because even the professionals don’t know which one is going to be the winner. You see thousands of companies, you back a handful, and you stay in for the long haul.
▶ Watch Simon Cook on why VCs back dozens from 39:42
That’s the discipline we bring to the London Real AI Investment Club. Every Monday a founder pitches live, we pull their story apart, and we look at a lot of companies so we can be picky about the few that matter. By the time a company is filing a prospectus, the venture rounds are long gone.
A 30-year-old studio, switched off
Electronic Arts is shutting down BioWare, the studio behind Mass Effect, and cutting around 400 jobs. It comes two months after EA went private in a buyout, and the next Mass Effect game has been cancelled. Thirty years of history, gone in one memo.
When Mo Gawdat, the former chief business officer of Google X, was on the show, I put Marc Andreessen’s argument to him: technology always creates better jobs in the end. Mo wasn’t having it. Our jobs went from labour to skill to intelligence, he said. “As you take those away, what’s left?”
▶ Watch Mo Gawdat on the future of jobs from 85:45
You don’t have to agree with Mo’s whole view to take the lesson. No company owes you a future, however talented you are and however legendary the studio. The people who sleep well are the ones whose wealth doesn’t depend on someone else’s restructuring plan.
For a lot of our members, that means putting capital to work in Dubai. It’s the number one destination on earth for wealth migration, and the families moving there want finished ultra-luxury homes they can walk into, not off-plan apartments. There aren’t nearly enough of them. That gap is exactly what we work on inside the Luxury Property Investment Circle: luxury transformations, where we buy dated villas in Dubai’s best neighbourhoods, rebuild them to the standard those buyers want, and sell, on a 12 to 16 month cycle.
And in France…
Yesterday I wrote about the riots in Paris and Robert Kiyosaki’s warning that “the rioting in France today is America in two years”. Since then France’s interior minister has reported more than 1,800 arrests after the weekend’s cost-of-living protests. This one isn’t going away quickly.
Today’s takeaway
Back many, early. Put your capital where the wealth is moving. And never hand your future to someone else’s spreadsheet.
Which side of these stories are you on: the early investor or the employee waiting for the memo? Tell me on X at @brianbrose.
This is commentary, not financial advice. Do your own research.
