I talk about business strategy, innovation & startups Author: Report - Chief Strategy Officer Mexico
México
Joined October 2010
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Javier I. Sevilla retweeted
Pricing in venture is wilder than ever.
$100M pre-seed is now normal.
Bessemer just raised $1.75BN for “early” and $4BN for growth.
So can you even do seed today without $1BN?
- Is capital truly one of the last remaining moats?
- Do all small seed funds and mid-sized firms just fade into irrelevance?
- Does entry price matter anymore when there are $TRN companies…
- Is this real or a bubble that is about to burst
I sat down with @spdholakia to discuss this and have added my notes from the discussion below.
1. This Is a Supercycle Like Never Before
Sameer has spent 31 years in software and has felt magic only a handful of times. A trillion-dollar supercycle followed every one of those moments, and he notes that it does not happen very often.
What is different and what is similar to prior cycles @altcap @infoarbitrage
2. Capital Is a Moat Today
Markets pick winners and the choice becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as it did when developers settled on SendGrid and Twilio. In legal AI, big law firms name just two major providers. Capital lets leaders scale at an extraordinary pace and build a brand, which draws talent and customers in a reinforcing flywheel.
Do you agree with this @venkyganesan @dafrankel
3. Who Wins and Who Loses in the Future of Venture Capital?
As industries professionalize, firms must be either a giant global platform that consolidates or an extreme specialist, such as an early-stage AI investor in San Francisco. Sameer counts Bessemer as a big global platform. Firms caught in between face a hard world to make money.
Is it go big or go home @rodriscoll @rabois @chetanp
4. The Rationale for Why Anthropic Would Compete With the Hyperscalers and Why We Invested
As in the cloud era, AI would be massively capital intensive, so it would consolidate to a handful of players with hundreds of apps on top. Microsoft had partnered with OpenAI and Google was building Gemini, while AWS had an undistinctive internal model and had just invested heavily in Anthropic.
5. Why Price Does Not Matter in a World of AI and the Metric That Truly Determines Value
Bessemer invested in Abridge at $5M of ARR for a $700M to $800M valuation, in Anthropic at roughly 150 times current ARR, and led Legora's $1.8B round at $20M of ARR. Sameer judges these deals on what the company can become in the next twelve months.
How has your relationship to price changed in a world of AI @mignano @mmurph
6. Why the Rise of Open Models Does Not Denigrate the Market for Closed Models
In a market this large, predicting the mix between closed and open tokens with any precision is irrelevant. Consumers, enterprises and governments will all want different flavors of intelligence. Bessemer has invested in both Anthropic and Fireworks to hold exposure to closed and open tokens.
Love to hear how you think about this @lqiao @bernhardsson
7. Why It Is a Permanent Structural Shift That Companies Will Stay Private for Longer, but Why It Will Open in 2028
With more dollars and more firms in private venture, companies will stay private longer, and most of the run-up in this boom will happen in private markets. Sameer still expects an unlock in IPOs later next year and in 2028.
Love to hear your thoughts on this @bgurley and how you see it evolving in 24 months?
(links in comments)
Javier I. Sevilla retweeted
Revolut: The World’s First Superagent? … Forget superapps, think superagents … a new generation of business models for an AI world … the emergence of A2A Commerce, and the Superagent Economy: peterfisk.com/2026/10/revolu…
Javier I. Sevilla retweeted
The companies saying they've built their own models are bullshitting you.
“Most of the people who are training their own model, almost every single time, it is a Chinese model that they have trained or added their own fine-tuning specialization on top of.
Then they call it their own model.
That is bullshit. You have added to it and tweaked it. You have not trained it from scratch.” @mcannonbrookes
Love to hear your thoughts @soldni @BlancheMinerva @chargoddard @Teknium
How many podcasts do you listen to when you hear leaders posturing without giving an opinion. Substance-less. So so many.
This episode with my friend @mcannonbrookes is anything but that.
- It is BS that agents will remove interfaces. Design becomes more important.
- Companies with their own models is BS. They are post-trained on Chinese models.
- The biggest enterprises in the world are fearful of Chinese models.
- Inference will get so much cheaper over time. It will be wild.
Mike does not hold back here and it was a joy. In a world of meh opinions and nuance, Mike was real and honest. My notes below.
1. Why Headless Is Brainless and Why You Have to Be Involved in the User Experience and Interface
Mike Cannon-Brookes stands by his line that "headless is brainless." Giving up on evolving the user interface and customer experience is a brainless bet, even as Atlassian invests heavily in MCP and CLIs so agents can read and write to its Teamwork graph.
2. Agents Will Not Remove All Interfaces. This Is What They Will Do
Horizontal agents, deep vertical agents and existing interfaces can all coexist. Agents in Claude, Codex, Cursor, Teams and Slack already use the Atlassian platform, and new Figma and Databricks features bring their tools inside it. Mike is a bear on the "magic button" thesis of one uber agent that does everything.
3. Are the Biggest Enterprises in the World Fearful of Using Chinese Models?
Some customers push back on Chinese models but not on open models, so Atlassian uses Nemotron, Mistral and other open models and no Chinese models in production. Mike notes many US models increasingly train on Chinese models without saying so.
4. The Companies Saying They've Built Their Own Models Are Bullsh*tting You
When a large company claims to have built its own model, it is usually a Chinese model, or occasionally Nemotron, with fine-tuning on top. Mike calls that BS, because tweaking a model is not training one from scratch.
5. Why Model Inference Will Get So Much Cheaper Over Time
The capital, startups and talent working on the price per watt performance of inference is enormous. New chips, better data center design and distillation will take years to come through, but Mike expects the price of LLM performance to fall at a precipitous rate.
6. What Seems Crazy but Will Be Incredibly Common in Five Years' Time?
People may stop knowing or caring which content AI has touched, much as moviegoers do not ask whether a film used CGI. Mike expects everyone to get used to possibly synthetic content, with artisanal work and human judgment standing out more.
(links in comments)
Javier I. Sevilla retweeted
Everyone's arguing about wrappers vs. harnesses. Here's my line:
A wrapper puts a UI on someone else's model. When the model ships that feature itself, the wrapper is dead.
A harness owns what the model can't: the tools, the context, the memory, the workflow. A better model makes it better too.
Simple test: does the next model release help you or kill you?
Which one are you building?
Javier I. Sevilla retweeted
1/ About a decade ago, I became a fan of something called the tranched fundraising round. I was revisiting one of my old blog posts on it recently, and I'm still a huge fan today. Read on >>
Javier I. Sevilla retweeted
For no reason whatsoever, some thoughts for emerging managers:
- Own as much as possible upfront
- Reserve a very small % of the fund for follow-on or bridging
- Have a real plan around secondaries
- Invest into more companies (which I get is a directly contradictory to 1)
Javier I. Sevilla retweeted
🇲🇽-🇺🇸 Kapital acquires US Woz Code for US$30 million
Mexican digital bank Kapital is acquiring Woz Code, a US artificial intelligence company, for US$30 million.
The deal strengthens its push to operate as a technology company with a banking license, with 30% of its budget going to research and development.
It comes as Kapital's valuation reaches US$2 billion after its latest round, up from US$1.3 billion a year ago.
Kapital serves more than 300,000 clients across Mexico, Colombia, the US, Puerto Rico and Spain, and is considering an IPO within three years.
Javier I. Sevilla retweeted
🇺🇾 💵 El 1% más rico posee el 40.5% de la riqueza de Uruguay, en comparación con el 34.8% en Estados Unidos ↓
A Estados Unidos se le asocia ampliamente con una concentración extrema de la riqueza, pero su 1% más rico posee una proporción menor de la riqueza nacional que el 1% más rico en Uruguay, México, Chile y Brasil.
🗞️ nuestro análisis más reciente analiza lo que la desigualdad de la riqueza revela y que los datos de ingresos pueden pasar por alto. Explora la historia → latinometrics.com/articles/h…
ALT The chart displays wealth distribution among the top 1% in Latin American countries, highlighting Uruguay's 40.5% compared to others.
Javier I. Sevilla retweeted
Theory: The difference in AI doomerism is largely generational, with the youngs thinking it's the end of the world and the olds not. Note how the 20-something lab staff thinks it's the techno-Rapture, and everyone from Jensen to pmarca (the olds) are telling them to chill out.
This is a symptom of a larger trend I've noticed as someone in the Xennial generation increasingly surrounded by Zoomers. There's what I call The Great Generational Inversion. The standard trope is that the conservative olds are scandalized by wayward youth, but it's precisely the opposite now.
The youngs don't offend me; I'd scandalize them if I actually said what I think. I'm not trying to censor them, they're (literally in my case, cf. Chaos Monkeys) trying to censor me. They don't seem wild and devil-may-care to me, they seem cautious and anxious and conformist. I'm still riding to hell on a fast horse lifestyle-wise, and they're all popping pills and peptides and as obsessed with their health as hypochondriac grandmas. The things the youth could always be depended on to do to excess--drinking, driving, fornication--they increasingly don't do at all.
It's very strange. Again, you could discard all this as the prattling of an out-of-touch boomer...but I'm not whining about our wanton, irresponsible youth, I'm saying they remind me of my grandparents and wish they lived a little more. It isn't how it's supposed to be, which makes it all the stranger.
Wonder if the generations will just all be flipped from the historical pattern going forward, or if this is a post-COVID one-off.
Javier I. Sevilla retweeted
More than 95% of banking around the world still runs through the same expensive branches. Customers pay for that infrastructure whether they use it or not.
We built Nu because that math never made sense to us. We were told it was impossible in Brazil. Then in Mexico. Then in Colombia. Now, more than 140 million people in these three countries trust us with their financial lives.
So the next step became obvious: keep expanding the model beyond our core markets.
Today, we are launching Nu in the United States through a partner bank model, with a full suite of financial products for everyday banking. And, for people whose lives already cross borders, we are also introducing Nu Global, a multi-currency digital account allowing fee-free, fast money movement across more than 35 countries.
There are certainly still those who think this is impossible. That disbelief has always been our best fuel.
Every time we entered a new market, the incumbents had more capital, more branches, more history. Every time, we brought our culture: people who choose the harder problem on purpose, teams that act like owners, and an obsession with fighting complexity and making customers love us fanatically.
The US market is the largest and most competitive financial market in the world. But despite the number of players, many customers still face complexity, high costs, and fragmented financial lives. Our answer is the one we have been executing in Latin America for thirteen years: no branches, technology built from the ground up, a low cost to serve — and that efficiency returned to customers as better yields, no fees, and service they don't have to fight for.
We have believed since day one that consumer-obsessed digital banking is the future of retail banking. That was never a Brazilian thesis, or a Latin American one. It is a global one.
Our launch of Nu US and Nu Global are where we start proving it: we are no longer building the largest digital bank in Latin America; we are building a global one.
And we are still in the first minute of the first half.
nu.com/en/newsroom/company/n…
Javier I. Sevilla retweeted
How Robinhood Could Disrupt the Whole IPO Market
“There are a lot more IPOs we need to get done, and it would be neat if Robinhood flipped the script so you really could have a decent IPO driven primarily by retail.
There are downsides. You hope institutional investors hold for two years, and more often than not they do, but that playbook sort of works.
If you could do a $200 million to $400 million IPO led through Robinhood, mostly by retail investors, that would be disruptive for a subset of startups and great for the ecosystem. Nvidia can’t buy everything.” @jasonlk
Love to hear your thoughts on this and how realistic you think this could be @bgurley @howardlindzon @infoarbitrage @vladtenev.
I get that we’re all busy, but if you choose to not listen to this podcast, you will be materially less intelligent.
On the agenda this week:
- Jensen Huang Declares AGI Has Arrived
- GPT Astra and Fable 5.1 Accelerate the Model Race
- Tesla Launches Cybercabs
- Index Pulls Out of Town & Anthropic Pulls From Descartes Acquisition
My notes below with @jasonlk and @rodriscoll
1. How Robinhood Could Disrupt the Whole IPO Market
Allowing retail investors through Robinhood to lead $200M to $400M tech IPOs could create a disruptive new path to liquidity for mid-stage startups. With traditional institutional listings constrained, retail-driven distribution could unlock critical exit opportunities across the venture ecosystem.
2. Why the Majority of Neo Labs Will Not Be Good Investments
Early Neo Labs became multi-trillion-dollar leaders, but backing new entrants today carries enormous risk given the capital and distribution moats of incumbents. Unless a new research lab develops a truly orthogonal model architecture, it will struggle to compete with established frontier labs.
3. Why the Oura IPO Will Be a Success
Strong consumer brand recognition, combined with 74% revenue growth and 85% subscriber retention, positions Oura for a successful public debut. Unlike typical consumer apps that suffer from severe churn, Oura’s sticky hardware-plus-subscription model provides the predictability public markets value.
4. The #1 Priority for Mark Zuckerberg
Big Tech incumbents are moving at unprecedented speed to defend their distribution against consumer AI startups. Meta’s top operational priority should be putting engineers in a room to rapidly clone emerging agentic applications before new entrants can establish lasting consumer habits.
5. When Someone Goes Risk-On, Everyone Goes Risk-On
Venture capital operates in momentum cycles where a single high-profile, risk-on deal can push the entire market to follow. In hypergrowth AI categories, investor behavior is often driven more by competitive pressure and deployment speed than by conservative financial modeling.
6. The People Making Money Are Running Fastest and Evolving Quickest
In a market where software features can be cloned in weeks, long-term success belongs to founders who continuously expand and adapt their products. Winning startups survive not by defending legacy features, but by executing relentlessly and compounding capabilities faster than their competitors.
Javier I. Sevilla retweeted
Last week, Tesla held an event in Austin introducing the two-seat, purpose-built Cybercab to its Robotaxi fleet, and then the following evening commercialized its first rides. Tesla disclosed that, in just six weeks, the Robotaxi fleet increased its unsupervised driving miles 2.6x, from the 380,000 reported during Tesla’s second-quarter earnings call to one million miles.
On its site, Tesla posted a “Robotaxi interest form” aimed at commercial fleet buyers, asking respondents to flag interest in purchasing a Cybercab fleet. As ARK outlined in Big Ideas 2026, fleet owners are an important component of the robotaxi value chain.
The Cybercab is central to scaling Tesla’s robotaxi service at competitive prices and, in ARK’s view, to expanding autonomous ride-hail into a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity. At scale, we project that robotaxis could be priced as low as $0.25 per mile—approximately one-tenth the cost of human-driven ride-hail, as shown below, and roughly one-third the cost of personal car ownership.
@TashaARK details more in this week's newsletter ⬇️
Javier I. Sevilla retweeted
It’s official: VW is Cutting 100,000 Jobs
On Thursday, the VW supervisory board unexpectedly agreed on a cost-cutting plan: a total of 100,000 jobs are to be eliminated worldwide.
According to Volkswagen, another 50,000 jobs will be cut across the group in the coming years including management positions on top of the already and previously agreed 50,000 job cuts.
The Volkswagen Group currently employs around 663,000 people worldwide; in a few years, that number will drop to just 560,000, and I expect further reorganizations, plant closures, and workforce reductions.
The plan also stipulates cutting the VW model lineup by around 50 percent and reducing product complexity by approximately 75 percent. The focus is to be placed on the most attractive vehicles. Additionally, the aim is to achieve "leaner management structures" and "shorter decision-making paths."
Those measures will lead to weaker demand and that will lead again to reduction in work force and plant closures.
This is merely the beginning of a very painful process, and an end is nowhere in sight.
Javier I. Sevilla retweeted
MEXICO | Volkswagen cuts 800 jobs and closes a production shift at its Puebla plant, once its largest outside Germany, as sales decline.
(Expansión)
Javier I. Sevilla retweeted
Broadcom’s transformation is wild.
$AVGO quarterly revenue:
2019 → ~$6B
Today → ~$30B
VMware added a new engine.
AI sent semiconductors soaring.
Javier I. Sevilla retweeted
BRAZIL | Crypto platforms Mercado Bitcoin and Bitso join forces to challenge Binance, combining 15M users and $130B in annual volume.
(Valor Econômico)
Javier I. Sevilla retweeted
Electronic Arts opened its first regional hub in Bogotá just last year and already lists 336 employees on LinkedIn. Why Bogotá instead of Mexico City or São Paulo?
Javier I. Sevilla retweeted
The costs of solar and wind energy have fallen, while the costs of nuclear power and fossil fuels keep rising.
Renewable energies are gaining ground not because people realize that climate change costs lives and destroys our environment, but because they are opting for the more cost-effective choice.