Prashanth Chandrasekar

Absolutely staggering the size of Amazon Web Services (AWS) 20 years since it started. It is the growth/margin driver of Amazon. As of the latest quarter, #AWS is now a $123.6B run-rate business, growing 17.5%. To put that in perspective, that is bigger each quarter, than Adobe ($21B revenue) and getting closer to what SAP ($37B revenue) and Salesforce ($37B revenue) do in a year! Wow! Congrats Andy Jassy, Matt Garman & team! Here are the summary stats after last week's quarterly results 1. Amazon Web Services (AWS) = $124B run-rate growing 18% 2. Microsoft Azure = $75B run-rate revenue growing 39% 3. Google Cloud = $54B run-rate revenue growing 32% https://lnkd.in/gtvQYjwC

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In 2010, Larry Ellison owned 23% of Oracle. Today, he owns 40%. How is that possible?     Capital Allocation. Oracle's resurgence in AI is getting alot of news but what we think is even more compelling is Oracle's understanding of capital allocation. The tech industry is often at the leading edge of innovation and business model transformation, but there's one area where the tech industry has under-optimized. #CapitalAllocation. In corporate America, capital structure is often at the core of optimizing shareholder value while in tech, it's the opposite. How often do tech founders and Boards think about the cost of equity dilution, ROIC/ROE, share buybacks and equity vs. alternative financing mix? In tech, the playbook for growth has been for decades to just raise equity throughout one's lifecycle. The result is additional dilution to founders, investors and employees. Oracle raised $32MM in their IPO and has not raised any equity since. They have raised over $150Bn+ in total debt for M&A, buybacks and general corporate uses, and repurchased ~$130Bn of their shares, offsetting equity dilution to increase equity returns.    At General Catalyst, we view the Oracle story as illustrative of a different approach tech companies can now take to build their customer base and fuel their growth. For decades, tech companies have relied solely on equity financing to fund their growth. The lack of alternative growth financing led us to create the Customer Value Fund (CVF), where we help companies of all sizes fund their sales & marketing, R&D investments and share buybacks, while minimizing shareholder dilution and risk. CVF allows companies to stop using their own cash to fund sales and marketing and instead, unlock that cash for other corporate uses, making the company more capital efficient without adding any risk to the business. To learn more, see the comments. General Catalyst #CustomerValueFund #CapitalAllocation

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Oracle plans to spend roughly $40 billion on Nvidia chips for a Stargate data center in Texas. ⚡️ About 400,000 advanced chips will be purchased for the giant facility in Abilene. The project is being developed by OpenAI and SoftBank, among others. This first Stargate project will house 1.2 gigawatts of computing power when finished sometime next year. 💻 The AI revolution is continuing to ramp up around the country. What do you think of this latest announcement? Share your thoughts below. ⬇️ Source: Silicon 5/26/2025 Disclaimer: This post is made for entertainment purposes only. Nothing in this post constitutes investment advice. #datacenters #AI #technology #innovation

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From our PearX S25 cohort, meet Pravāh, the AI-native operating system for the electric grid When Mohak Mangal, Dhruv Suri, and Aman Gupta looked at the strain on the U.S. electric grid, they saw a system pushed to its limits. Exploding demand and unpredictable supply have made blackouts increasingly common. This costs the economy more than $150B a year, a number that could 10x in the next five years. Mohak Mangal and team founded Pravāh to help fix it. Their platform helps utilities and grid operators make real-time decisions on load, generation, and congestion, reducing blackout risks, optimizing power procurement, and bringing much-needed stability to the backbone of modern life. We’re proud to support the Pravāh team as they take on one of the toughest and most important infrastructure challenges of our time.

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Oracle is taking the Cloud Wars global. With its new Globally Distributed Exadata Database on Exascale, enterprises can scale across regions, stay compliant with local laws, and avoid rewriting their app stacks. As SVP Wei Hu shared in the latest Cloud Wars Live podcast, it’s a unified data experience built for #fintech, #ecommerce, and #AI-driven apps.  Check out the episode → https://lnkd.in/ekUrXrpF

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It’s launch time! After 12 years of building AI infrastructure, I started Parasail (https://www.parasail.io) to build an open compute economy to power the AI revolution.  It’s essential that AI not be a walled garden built and owned by the largest technology companies. The future of AI must be an open playing field top to bottom. To win in the market, my cofounder Tim Harris and I raised $10M and made three key contrarian bets that are key to this theme:  -The 2023 GPU shortage would quickly become GPU abundance.  - The hyperscalers aren’t going to run away with the market; instead, they are going to face intense competition from new GPU clouds and open-source models.  - The fastest growing AI-native companies will need lightspeed velocity. Quick and easy access to the latest AI models and an abundance of GPUs will be at the top of their list of wants. These bets are paying off. After spending the better part of 2024 building and the last few months in beta, we are happy to launch publicly serving 10+ Billion tokens a day (most of that production traffic), working with dozens of companies and hundreds of developers. The easy path takes you somewhere crowded, and we took the harder path to build a better product. First, we built some incredible Kubernetes-based technology that lets us work with dozens of the best GPU clouds without drowning in complexity. The result for customers is the best prices, the best availability of GPUs, and on-demand GPU capacity that is bigger than Oracle’s entire GPU fleet. Second, we built the inference platform of my dreams – a one-stop-shop for every AI deployment need. We can run just about any transformer on HuggingFace. We have ultra-fast tokens and ultra-cheap tokens. We are hosting serverless endpoints, managing dedicated deployments at production scale, and running massive overnight batch jobs for customers.  Customers are loving our platform, and I’d love for you to try it out as well. You can try out any model on HuggingFace and scale to billions of tokens without any contracts or hassle. Head over to https://www.parasail.io, create an account, and let me know what you think! 

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Covid era money printing resulted in mega VC funds and bad venture economics. A lot of this is getting rolled back and will result in a brutal few years for the entire venture ecosystem. Here are 8 hard truths about where the market is headed and what it means for your startup. 1. Quantitative easing -> Rise of Mega funds - Covid era quantitative easing gave rise to cheap liquidity and rise of mega funds.  - Billion+ dollar funds went from 11 (2016) to 53 (2022) 2. Mega Funds -> Perverse economics - A 2% management fee on a billion dollar funds ($20M+ annual salary) likely created a bias towards AUM (asset under management) from DPI (distribution of paid in capital) 3. Mega Funds -> Inflated Valuations - Large funds resulted in massive investments & valuations  - Median series B pre money went from $80M (2019) to $260M (2022) - $500M series C rounds 4. Inflated Valuations -> Overhiring - 2019-2022: median VC‑backed tech start‑ups doubled FTEs and payroll  - 2023-2025: layoffs exceeded 300K amongst 1500 venture backed companies - Expect further 10%-15% reduction as boards mandate <1.5x burn multiples 5. Megafunds -> Unfortunate Founder Conditioning - Founders praised for larger burn and bigger checks not margins - Burn multiples > 3x becomes normal 6. Inflated Valuations -> Stalls M&A (2025) - While public SaaS multiples are 6x-8x ARR, late stage privates are still at 15x - Checks deployed in 2 years (2022) will take over 10 years to DPI - Almost no IPO in sight 7. Stalled M&A -> Shake Out (2025-2027) - Zombie funds: 30%+ of 2022 funds fail to raise follow ons - Board demands path to profit within 18 months - LPs demand distribution before follow on investments - Down rounds, repricing and roll ups becoming standard. Not good. 8. AI ventures -> Shrinking fund economics - AI is uncovering new and explosive growth opportunities - However, many AI ventures rocket to prominence but spawn a dozen clones in no time leading to a slowdown in growth  - Many AI ventures are forcing series A GPs to pay for <10% ownership or sit out forcing shrinking fund economics CONCLUSION Excess money printing led to risky investments disguised as “innovation premiums” We are going to see a purge and a reset Over capitalized funds will be forced to shrink or merge, bringing capital discipline and genuine value creation back into fashion While this illusion is breaking - Venture and fundraising isn’t dead by any means. It is just becoming healthier, more capital efficient and disciplined. Ventures that create genuine value will continue to get higher valuations, now more than ever.

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Oracle’s “AI moment” in 2025 was almost 50 years in the making. In September, one earnings call added roughly 200 billion dollars in market value and moved Oracle from “legacy vendor” back into the center of the AI conversation. It looked sudden. But it was not. In the late 1970s, Oracle commercialised a relational database inspired by IBM research and proved it on mission critical workloads for the CIA and later other government agencies. That database became the quiet centre of gravity for the company. Over decades, the same core: → spread into 94 percent of Fortune 100 companies → delivered 102% net dollar retention over four years → was wrapped with a full suite of enterprise applications → was rebuilt for the cloud, then adapted for AI From the outside, it looks like three different Oracles: database company, enterprise applications company, AI cloud company. In reality, it is one technical foundation compounding across several computing waves. The strongest franchises often start as “boring” infrastructure that solves a narrow but very hard problem. Their moat is built through reliability, compliance and deep integration into critical workflows, not through brand or marketing. For long stretches, the market prices them like utilities. Then a platform shift arrives and suddenly the same assets are revalued as strategic infrastructure. Follow us at APEX Ventures and subscribe to our newsletter for exclusive content on groundbreaking Deep Tech startups:   🔗 https://t2m.io/EV2qHQuo

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The Wall Street Journal just broke news that Oracle and OpenAI just inked a $300B cloud computing deal which is among the biggest in history. What an incredible follow-up to yesterday's Oracle quarterly financial release! The interest aspect to this is how OpenAI will pay for it given that they have recently come out saying they expect $115B in negative cash flow over the next two years. What do you think? #management #venturecapital #privateequity #capitalmarkets #ai #aifinance https://lnkd.in/gYResWuv

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Harpoon Ventures + Black Flag is teaming up with Microsoft for Startups to provide founders with access to up to $250,000 in Azure credits, empowering builders to scale faster, train models more efficiently, and access world-class AI infrastructure. What’s included: ⚡ Up to $250K in Azure credits (usable across Azure OpenAI, Grok 3, Llama 4, and more) 💻 On-demand GPU VMs for model training and fine-tuning 🧠 Access to GitHub Enterprise + Microsoft 365 Business Premium 🤝 Dedicated Microsoft technical + GTM support This partnership is designed to give deep-tech and dual-use founders the tools and resources they need to win. Because when they win, we all win. 🏴‍☠️

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