AMD acquires World Labs for ~$8.2b. But who gets the 💰? My usual breakdown below 👇 From founding to an $8.2b exit in ~2.5 years. A huge value creation event. This is a fantastic exit, especially for the co-founders and the team. Investors will still share ~$2.3b of profits on $1.2b invested, a ~2.9x blended. Low-ish because most of the capital came in last. But it hides a lot of disparity between the various rounds! So let's dive in: 1) The real home run: founders and team 🏆🥳 This is one of the best founder outcomes I've modelled. @drfeifei, Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner and Ben Mildenhall started World Labs in Apr-24. Less than 2.5 years later, they and the team still own ~56% according to my estimates. At an $8.2b valuation, that's a total prize of ~$4.6b to share between them. Taking a 15% attributed option pool, that's ~$1.2b for the team and ~$3.4b for the four co-founders. If split equally, that's ~$850m each, in just two and a half years. 💸 And, at close, Fei-Fei Li joins AMD as EVP and Chief Scientist, reporting to Lisa Su! Legendary. 2) The buyer was already on the cap table (again) 🔁 AMD Ventures invested in the Series B and the Series C here. Now they are buying the whole company. It's the same playbook as Nvidia with Hugging Face: strategic corporates are using their venture arms as a free option on future acquisitions. 3) The standout VC winners: a16z and Radical Ventures 👑 Both backed Fei-Fei at inception, in Apr-24 at a ~$300m valuation. That Series A will return ~19x the money, or ~$1.2b of proceeds, in under 2.5 years. Congrats to @martin_casado and team. Another mega win after Cursor and OpenRouter. The team at @a16z truly is on a generational run. 4) The star angels did well 🌟 The Sep-24 Series B had arguably the strongest AI angel list ever assembled: Geoffrey Hinton, Andrej Karpathy, Jeff Dean, Eric Schmidt, Reid Hoffman, Marc Benioff, Ram Shriram and more. Priced at $1.3b, it was never going to be a 1,000x. But ~5x in two years is a ~125% IRR 📈 And the best part is: Hinton's AlexNet won the 2012 ImageNet competition, and ImageNet was the dataset Fei-Fei built. Twelve years later, he backed her company. Full circle. 🔄 5) The late money: a great IRR, but a poor multiple of money 🤏 The $1b Series C in Feb-26 at $5.4b returns ~1.5x in 7 months. That's a great IRR, but in terms of venture returns, this is a poor multiple of money. Although I am sure no one will complain about seeing DPI this quickly! Congrats to all involved!