Descriptions:
This episode of 20VC with Harry Stebbings covers three interlocking threads: the legal war between Elon Musk and Sam Altman over OpenAI’s nonprofit-to-for-profit conversion, the sustainability of the venture capital model as public market multiples compress for legacy software, and early market reactions to Figma’s IPO.
On the Musk-Altman lawsuit, Scale Venture Partners’ Rory O’Driscoll provides a detailed breakdown of why the case is structurally difficult for Musk to win: proving that Altman intended from the outset to convert the nonprofit into a vehicle for private enrichment requires demonstrating fraudulent intent at the time of founding — a high evidentiary bar when Altman’s own capital was invested in the nonprofit form. O’Driscoll also offers an unusually candid psychological reading of Greg Brockman, arguing that departing Stripe in 2015 — when the company was valued at $3 billion and before it became worth orders of magnitude more — may be a lasting wound that explains some of his behavior throughout the OpenAI litigation.
The VC discussion centers on whether declining public multiples for Figma, Datadog, and PagerDuty are a structural threat to venture returns or simply a market bifurcation — rewarding high-growth AI-native companies like ElevenLabs, Replit, and Lovable with extreme forward multiples while compressing valuations for slower-growing legacy SaaS. The episode also touches on whether AI-driven code generation represents a genuine threat to the software category’s long-term revenue multiples.
📺 Source: 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Published January 22, 2026
🏷️ Format: Podcast
