Let’s talk about Valar Atomics, shall we? The story starts in El Segundo, a California deeptech hub in the shadow of a Chevron oil refinery. Our protagonist, Isaiah Taylor, is an Idaho wunderkind with a heart of gold, a GED, and a burning desire to make energy abundant. Isaiah starts Valar at age 24, knowing that he can build nuclear reactors better, cheaper, and way faster than anyone else can. But there’s one problem: The year is 2023, VCs still have a hard-on for vertical SaaS companies (whoops!), and you can’t say the word “capex” on Sand Hill Road without getting laughed out of the room (that is, if the Harvard MBAs sipping their iced matcha lattes even remember what that word means). So Isaiah does what any good founder does and, like a boss, he gets the job done anyway. He closes a capital raise that includes a check from a firm called Day One (more about that shortly), gives everyone some pro-rata rights (more about that shortly, too!), builds a reactor, flips on the switch, and gets it to reach criticality. (Don’t know what criticality is? Don’t worry, the MBAs who pivoted from investing in “Uber for Goldendoodles” to wearing Carhartt jackets around the Amex Centurion Lounge don’t know what it is either.) Now, a quick tangent about pro-rata rights. Pop quiz: What’s the number-one goal for any venture capitalist? [A young man in a Carhartt jacket and a Stanford baseball cap pours Margot another glass of champagne.] Thank you, Preston; you may return to Palo Alto now. So, the pop quiz. VCs, like any asset manager, always want to be able to raise their next fund. And there’s no better way to get LP capital for your next fund than to say you previously invested in a “100 bagger” startup and that you have pro-rata rights to invest even more. LPs love it, they give you even more money, you collect even more fees, you get to rent an even bigger ski lodge in Tahoe for your six-week vacation coming up, and life is good. Let’s get back to Valar. Once they reach criticality and show the world that—unlike Salesforce for Labradoodles—there’s some real technology here, they become the hottest commodity Silicon Valley has seen since Zuck’s hoodie days. Everyone wants to invest, some big names start throwing some big money around, and Valar is on its way to a billion-dollar war chest. But here’s the next problem—I know, it’s Saturday night and you’ve got better things to do than read a bathtub shitpost about venture capital legal drama, but I promise you, we’re almost done. Day One has pro-rata rights, and Day One is more like Day Ninety-Nine Problems. Day One’s founder allegedly has some questionable connections to Russia and some even more questionable connections to a guy who—well, let’s not even go there. So when you hear Day One, think dodgy money, dodgy emails, and some very, very dodgy friends. And that puts our patriotic friends at Valar in a bind, because the US government, thanks to the Department of War and the Department of Energy, is now an important source of capital for deeptech startups, and they most likely have concerns over something called CFIUS. (Don’t know what CFIUS is? It’s the one thing standing between you and all your cell phone conversations being routed to a CCP data center from backdoors in our telecom infrastructure. Thank you, CFIUS!) Valar can’t have Day One putting even more money into the company, so they ask them to forgo their pro-rata rights, as well as something called a “springback” that supports those rights. But Day One doesn’t want to, because they’re already probably having a hard time raising their next fund (boy, those you-know-who files sure are inconvenient!), and their pro-rata rights in Valar are the one ace left up their sleeve. Which brings us to today. Valar files suit against Day One, Isaiah drops the hammer on Twitter, Day One’s founder hammers back, and now here we are, posting Big Short bathtub memes about it. Get it? Good. Now, unless you have some cheap GPUs or Anthropic secondary shares for me, grab your Carhartt jacket and get out of my bathroom.