Thomas Laffont: The $4T AI IPO Wave, 2026's Unicorn Economy, and the 10X Paradox

Why do you think I waited to make my world podcast premiere for All In? All the ankle biters called and I said, no. I'm just gonna wait. I'm gonna wait to the besties' call. COTU is one of the most successful hedge funds of the last two decades. $55,000,000,000 under management. This is their flagship hedge fund. The reason we decided to kinda get into this business is to find great entrepreneurs and find great companies. And they're looking to raise a whole billion dollars more to invest in AI. We're in an idea business, and when you have a truly revolutionary idea, it can get really big. I hope to do something a little bit different. Besties, you've been on for a couple hours, so you can take a break now for a few minutes. Sit back. We are gonna show you some slides, and we're gonna walk you through really an update on the unicorn economy. So the markets are back. We can see that the unicorn economy on average since September '24 is up 70%. I think that's intuitive to a lot of us. But what's even more amazing is that the public market has really made the same move up. So if we look at the share of the unicorn economy of the Nasdaq, which had a significant move up since 2015, it's really kind of plateaued over the past few years, and I think it speaks to the performance of public companies like Palo Alto and others. So AI is dominating fundraising. What's kind of interesting in this slide is you can see their share continues to increase. So multiple years in a row now that AI is increasing its wallet share of fundraising. But the composition of that funding has changed. If you look at the Unicorn Factory, which really peaked in the Zurich era of 2021, we've now really normalized at a much lower level pre COVID. So mathematically, if you put both together, you can see that the funding per unicorn has increased five x since 2021. So we have fewer unicorns that are each raising more. Now I'm gonna spend a minute on this slide because this slide is really about the health of our ecosystem. So the way to interpret this is if you look at the green line, which is the pre zerp era unicorn cohort, of which there's about 73. You can see that 20 after becoming a unicorn, 80% of them had either raised a new round or exited, which is, I would say, pretty healthy. Now if we look at the 2021 cohort, which is the red line, two things stand out. First, that twenty quarters in, you can see less than 20% less had either exited or raised. But look at the number, 479 versus 73 in the prior cohort. So now here comes this new cohort, what we'll call our 2024 cohort of AI companies, and the key question is, what will happen …