Venture Market Structure: Concentration, Scaling, And Fund Positioning
Venture is experiencing a structural 'death of the middle' where mid-sized generalist funds are disadvantaged versus large generalists or small specialists.
When investors realize they were wrong about a company that is becoming a winner, a key corrective action is to re-enter later at lower ownership rather than let pride prevent participation.
If robotics works well, it could expand the technology-addressable market by roughly 100x.
Venture Underwriting, Ownership, And Fund Structure
Series A as an 'entry point' cannot be generalized as good or bad because round nomenclature now spans widely different company states.
The strongest software businesses create lock-in with high switching costs such that customers are effectively 'hostages' rather than voluntary customers.
Even if AI reduces demand for certain roles (e.g., support labor), companies may redeploy remaining human labor toward higher-touch, revenue-generating customer experiences rather than eliminating it entirely.
Spot Listing Frictions And Stalled Breadth
Hyperliquid’s spot ticker auctions generated roughly $25M in Q1 2025 and fell to under $1M in Q4 as auctions largely disappeared.
BLP is Hyperliquid’s native portfolio margin system and entered a pre-alpha rollout in late December with a 5 million USDC supply cap and USDC-only support.
Hyperliquid’s outsourcing listing model requires trusting third-party deployers for safe/effective builds and splits listing revenue 50/50 with deployers.
Company Specific Operating Theses Robotics Fintech Convergence And Defensibility
Amazon’s human headcount has been roughly flat over the last five years while robot headcount has grown around 20–30%.
Alliance automates about 50% of startup application review by encoding heuristics into prompts to filter out obviously weak applications rather than selecting the best ones.
AI coding assistants benefit early-stage startups more than large companies because context-window limits make small new codebases easier for AI to operate on than large legacy systems.