Is there anything left to fund besides AI? The TWiST VC panel weighs in
Key takeaways from the This Week in Startups VC roundtable with Hussein KanjiDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → (Hoxton Ventures), Sheel MohnotDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → (Better Tomorrow Ventures) and Dave McClure (Practical VC), hosted by Jason CalacanisDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → (August 2026):
"Sinister and cynical." Calacanis argued Sam Altman's move on the OpenClaw project was "so sinister and cynical" — OpenAI hired the founder internally, and the moment he left, the open-source project lost its voice and momentum. He said he'd never seen a project go from universally embraced to "completely toxic" so quickly, whether by design or coincidence.
Is anything left to fund besides AI? The panel agreed AI, space tech, defence tech and robotics dominate VC attention — but Mohnot pushed back that fintech and e-commerce remain large, under-funded categories, especially outside the US in emerging markets.
Bill Gates' AI warning. Reacting to Gates' 6,000-word essay, the panel largely agreed job displacement is coming but split on timing. Kanji framed automation replacing even "higher cognition" work as "a genuine problem," invoking Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano; Mohnot noted many displaced jobs were already offshored 20 years ago.
The sole-proprietor boom. McClure and Mohnot predicted AI's biggest beneficiaries will be small businesses and solo operators — a therapist replacing a receptionist, scheduler and biller with AI — while Kanji forecast a "Cambrian explosion" in sole proprietorships as graduates who can't land jobs at big tech launch their own companies.
Taxing the AI wave. Kanji floated the government taking 10–20% of Anthropic and OpenAI to address national debt; Mohnot countered that taxing tokens makes no sense (costs trend to zero) but taxing excess profits or scarce resources like power does. Calacanis predicted auctioned self-driving delivery licences within two years.
Stripe buys OpenRouter. The panel read Stripe's reported ~$8–12bn acquisition of OpenRouter (at 50–100x revenue) as "infrastructure respecting infrastructure" — Stripe routes money, OpenRouter routes inference — a strategic, founder-led bet on where AI spend flows.
Cursor's record M&A. The group flagged the ~$60bn Cursor deal as the biggest M&A ever, with Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive turning ~$44–60m into billions (~150x). They also criticised Y Combinator's public attacks on rivals as a recurring "playbook."
Optimistic bets. Kanji highlighted Hoxton portfolio names Abacus (on-prem sovereign AI) and Micro1 ($500m training revenue, $4bn valuation); McClure pointed to CUSP AI (materials science, marked to $2.6bn) and a computer-generated prostate-cancer drug entering clinical trials.
Read more: This Week in Startups
