20VC: Jensen Huang Investigation: What Happens Now | Sequoia Leave London, Close Scout Program and End Evergreen Fund | NASDAQ Loses $2.5TRN in 24 hours | Anthropic targets $1.4TRN IPO valuation

What It Covers

Sequoia closes its London office, ends its scout program, and winds down its Evergreen Fund; Jensen Huang faces a federal investigation tied to a Chinese intelligence connection; Anthropic targets a $1.4T IPO valuation; and the NASDAQ drops $2.5T in a single day amid AI market jitters and agent-driven infrastructure shifts.

Key Questions Answered

• •Evergreen Fund failure: Sequoia's Evergreen structure collapsed for three reasons: it launched in 2022-23 when tech stocks dropped 30%, LPs resisted locked-up liquidity, and individual partners already captured their carry upside with no incentive to force LP holding. The lesson for fund managers is that structurally sound ideas fail when LP liquidity needs and GP compensation misalign with the vehicle's design.
• •IPO pricing strategy: Anthropic's decision to price its IPO at $70–$78 per share — roughly 20–30% above its last private round — reflects a deliberate low-start strategy. Starting below market demand and walking the price up generates momentum and confidence. Starting high and correcting destroys confidence permanently. Founders and CFOs planning public offerings should anchor initial ranges conservatively and let demand drive upward movement.
• •Public vs. private capital advantage: Once Anthropic completes its IPO and holds roughly $200B on its balance sheet, it gains access to converts, secondaries, and follow-on offerings unavailable to private competitors like OpenAI. OpenAI, still private and raising $11B+ from retail, faces structural capital disadvantage. Founders should prioritize going public when near breakeven — the financing flexibility unlocked outweighs short-term valuation optimization.
• •AI inference security threat: Nine leading AI developers reported bot-swarm attacks in October alone, with losses reaching $1M before detection. Attackers steal API keys — default spending limits can reach $100K per key — and drain inference budgets within seconds. Any company storing Anthropic or OpenAI API keys in third-party infrastructure should immediately audit default spending caps, rotate credentials regularly, and implement anomaly-detection on token consumption.
• •Seat-based SaaS structural decline: Markets are repricing seat-license businesses — Atlassian, Figma, HubSpot — because agents replace human users, making per-seat revenue models structurally terminal. Companies like Cloudflare and Twilio, which benefit directly from agentic workloads, are growing at 39% and accelerating. Founders and investors should evaluate whether a product's revenue model scales with agent adoption or shrinks as human seat counts decline.
• •AI-native velocity gap: Pre-AI companies cannot match the shipping speed of AI-native startups regardless of internal AI adoption initiatives. Cloudflare cut 20% of headcount and accelerated to 39% growth; Freshworks crossed $1B with 30% fewer employees; Palantir generates $2M revenue per employee at near-100% growth. Operators at legacy SaaS companies should benchmark output-per-engineer against AI-native peers and treat the gap as a strategic, not operational, problem.