This week at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event in Athens — part of the Panathenea festival taking place in the city — I sat down with Niko Bonatsos of Verdict Capital, Andreas Stavropoulos of Threshold Ventures, and Ben Blume of Atomico to ask about the current state of venture investing, the wave of mega-IPOs that SpaceX is about to kick off, and where they still see an ocean of opportunity. Our conversation, following, has been edited for length and clarity. You can check out the full discussion at page bottom.
With SpaceX reportedly eyeing a $1.75 trillion valuation at IPO, and OpenAI and Anthropic potentially not far behind, what will the impacts be on the broader market?
Andreas Stavropoulos: I remember how exciting the Google IPO was, and how it ushered in a reopening of a market that had been very pessimistic about tech in the early 2000s — how it was an enabling event that brought in a whole new generation of entrepreneurs. The same thing is happening now. With every subsequent wave of paradigm shifts, the scale changes by orders of magnitude, and that’s to be expected. What business today in the information age is not a technology business?
Ben Blume: These are phenomenal companies, and with each one of these scale liquidity events, they generate wealth and returns that go back into the next generation of companies.
