Summary
Menlo Ventures partner Shawn Ganesan sat down with Bloomberg Technology to discuss the firm’s freshly closed $3 billion fund — the largest in its 50-year history — and the investment philosophy underpinning it. Ganesan frames the current AI moment as akin to the Renaissance, with San Francisco playing the role of Florence and founders like Dario Amodei standing in for Da Vinci.
The conversation digs into Menlo’s high-conviction bet on Anthropic: the firm committed $500 million into an $18 billion round in 2023, at a time when most investors assumed OpenAI and Microsoft had already locked up the market. Ganesan also describes a deliberate “barbell” strategy — backing pre-product-market-fit founders at the seed stage through a nimble, smaller-committee process, while doubling down on clear breakout winners like Anthropic and Lovable. He notes the firm has tilted away from fintech and SaaS toward AI-centric verticals, including AI in drug discovery and healthcare.
Ganesan touches on the changing cap table dynamics at frontier AI labs, where mutual funds, hyperscalers, and strategic investors are joining rounds alongside traditional VCs. He also describes how Menlo is using AI internally — including deploying OpenAI Whisper for meeting intelligence — and how the firm sources founders by embedding technical operators like Tim Tully (Splunk co-founder) and Jeff Redfern (former Atlassian CPO) as partners who can engage at the research level.
📺 Source: Bloomberg Technology · Published June 23, 2026
🏷️ Format: Interview
