Now, I'm not saying that's going to happen -- but if you take analogies from the dot-com era and assume they're going to play out in the same way, you can't just cherry-pick the bad ones.
Anthropic had valuation of $550M at their first venture round, and assuming it IPOs at roughly $2T, it will take them 5 years to give this 3500x return to their initial investors.
So you're absolutely correct about the comparison.
That said, I bet whatever happens over the next 20 years goes beyond what any of us can imagine. I wouldn't be surprised if the winners of this paradigm are worth hundreds of trillions. Sounds ridiculous until you look backwards and valuation a and consider this is an exponential curve and time is compressing.
And the winners may be not be the obvious choice.
The way we measure inflation is focused on consumption goods that everyone depends on. It doesn't take into account the stock market.
In other words we could stay around 3% in measured inflation but see ~30% annual equity inflation...
So my point is that the most valuable companies in 20 years could be worth hundreds of trillions while the cost of a can of beans is like $5, not $200.
Zimbabwe type inflation happens when the economy doesn't get more efficient at producing stuff as fast as the government prints money. If the economy increases efficiency very quickly and the government prints money to peg at 2% inflation, the products we consume only increase a little bit while scarce assets increase a lot.
This is why in the time I took a can of beans to increase in price 3x a house increased 20x.
Almost certainly nobody if you're tracking post-IPO growth.
And not because there won't be survivors/winners when the next crash comes (there probably will be) but because of the market changes (in the wake of legislation like the JOBS act) that result in these companies having their significant growth periods prior to IPO instead of after it.
IPOs used to be a launch pad to growth, now they are just a way for private investors to finally cash out when the company is already close to peak valuation.
Companies are staying private longer, raising many orders of magnitude more private funding, and IPOing straight into "top 10 biggest companies in history" size.
If you IPO at $1.5T you are already equivalent to ~1.5% of World GDP.
Thus is just for scale, as comparing GDP vs a company market cap doesn't make total sense since GDP is 1 year economic activity and market caps represent discounted future cashflows of future economic activity...
Let's say Anthropic IPOs at $1.5T and grows even 1000x over 20 years, it would be worth $1.5P (petabillion?). If it had a 20x earnings multiple like google this would imply Net Income of $75T. Mag7 total Net Income for 2025 was $500B or $0.5B.
World GDP is $125T, and has grown less than 5%/year before/thru/after DotCom. So lets say in 20 years its $250B and Anthropic is capturing 30% of world GDP in earnings (not revenue, that would be even higher)!!
So the math doesn't math.
Note that I'm not saying OAI/Anthropic are destined for success - because the rate of change combined with competition with cheap Chinese models is pretty novel in the business case history. But I am saying that pessimistic dot-com-boom comparisons don't seem to be all that deep.
But this is further to the point that the economics are more Amazon than Pets.com. If the plans are losers, great, when they need to be profitable they kill the plans and focus on metered tokens.
Isn’t the difference that ai labs can’t stop the R&D spend? They have to continue training new models.
B) nobody is IPOing at $400 million like Amazon did except SPAC share dilution scams, that you have to be willing to pick up at $30 million a year later
C) private secondary markets solve that, for some and are pretty great
D) tokenized synthetic and SPV backed private secondary markets in crypto ecosystems like Hyperliquid give you that exposure too, so now everyone can replicate the 90s
Exactly You can't wait to IPO until you're already one of the 10 biggest companies ever AND also grow 2500x post-IPO.
Retail is now exit liquidity for Big VC.